Sep 09 2011

FRIDAY?

Man! It’s often helpful keeping a three-posts-a-week schedule, but sometimes I just don’t have anything to post. Today is one of those days. However, the reason for it is a good one: Vigilance now has a sponsor!

I’ve spent the past two days working on the necessary changes for the sponsored version. It’ll be out shortly once those are done, hopefully next week. Then I’ll finally get to close the door on Vigilance and get on with overhauling Fight Back, which should let me post a ton of new pictures and music tracks and videos with new cool stuff for months. 😀 Sit tight!

Sep 07 2011

FUTURE VISION

I’ve spent two days adapting Fight Back for higher res and I still haven’t touched any of the code! I’ve just been mocking up new gameplay and menu screens in GIMP, trying to get a handle on how the game will look.

Menu wise, I’ve decided to break things up a lot and go for a clean, simple layout that’s a bit like Rez:

I’ll probably put some soft-focus stuff on the right, like ship schematics or something.

In-game – ignore the actual detail in the background, it’s a quickly filtered snap from Google Maps just as a placeholder 😀 The ships are higher resolution but the same size on screen, and I’ve put in the new dual energy bars instead of the old heat bar:

If I end up targeting Flash Player 11 or download, I may end up doing 3D backgrounds for this.

The next job on this project is to go into the code to decouple the rendering from the game logic. This is going to be messy, but when it’s done I’ll be able to drop in all these new assets no trouble – and probably still support the old resolution, if I feel like it!

It’ll be interesting seeing how Flash copes with doing about 8 times as much work. The higher resolution means there are six times as many pixels to draw each frame, and that shot above has one graphics layer more than the original – for vignetting. I think I’ll probably end up targeting Flash Player 11 just because it’ll hardly run on low end PCs otherwise 😀

Sep 05 2011

FORWARD

Right! I think I’ve got a plan. I am going to push on with Fight Back for now, but I’m not committing to making it a big thing just yet. Right now I’m going to focus on making it the best damn Flash game it can possibly be. I’ll keep my options open. In a few months from now, I can make the decision: either start work towards a big, shiny HD version for cash money, or ship it for Flash and move on. There’ll always be more projects to take up!

Not much else to report. At the moment I’m balancing some contract work with sorting out the portal versions of Vigilance. It’s a fair bit of work! I’m going all out with the various portals’ high score tables and so on. Who knows, right? I have to test the waters first to see if it’s worth doing next time…

I’ve also finally got Vigilance under 10MB, which is well overdue. Major lesson learned from all this: Flash games have to be small! It’s hard being a Flash developer and an audiophile 🙂

Sep 02 2011

ROADMAP

Well, work on Vigilance is completed. I’ve spent this week on a contract project that leapt out at me from nowhere, which should be good money. Some time next week, though, I need to move on to other things…

Here’s an old shot of the main thing I’m considering.

Yup. FIGHT BACK is back on the radar, and I’m plotting a course to take it from “cool prototype” up to “finished product”.

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Aug 31 2011

SURFING THE WAVE

Fear Is Vigilance went up a week ago. It’s now been played over 6,000 times, which is more downloads than Beacon got in that time! It’s shown up on RPS, in a PC Gamer roundup, on Reddit (hi Reddit!)…

Well, the real traffic to Flash games comes from people hitting Flash portals. I’m putting together a portal-friendly version of the game to send out shortly. It’ll have prominent links back to my site here, no sitelock, and I’ll probably put together a 10MB version as well for those portals who object to a larger file.

However you look at it, Vigilance is a commercial failure. I’m going to make a few hundred dollars from MochiAds, but that’s terrible money for a few months’ work. Still, it was a lot of fun to do, it was a valuable experiment, and seeing people enjoy it really does make it feel worthwhile. Thanks for playing and commenting – it makes all the difference 🙂

Aug 29 2011

USING MOCHIADS WITH HAXE

If you remember my last HaXe tutorial, on getting a preloader working? Here’s another, on getting preloader ads working. Specifically, on compiling and linking a HaXe project with the Mochi API, which isn’t available for HaXe. This could be extended to getting the Playtomic API working with HaXe, or damn near anything else that just has an AS3 API.
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Aug 28 2011

A SLIGHT AMENDMENT

Spent Friday and Saturday playing Deus Ex: HR. SO GOOD.

Anyway, back to work. I’ve just patched Fear is Vigilance to fix a bug that stopped IE8 users from playing. That’s not cool! My server host sorted out the issues with Apache, too, so the server’s responding and everything even with lots of traffic. BONUS.

As a bit of a celebration for all this, here’s some of the Fear Is Vigilance soundtrack for download 😀

– Vigilance – Charity (Title Theme)
– Vigilance – Get Violent
– Vigilance – Ending (Long Mix)

This is the original version of the ending track, before I cut it down to make the ending a sensible length. It’s extra epic!

Aug 22 2011

AD BREAK

Yup!

I doubt anyone ever is a fan of ads, but it should hopefully bring in some beer money at least. Getting MochiAds to play nice in HaXe is a surprising amount of work – no-one supports HaXe! – but it’s done now. I’ll put up another tutorial post later like I did with the preloader, once I’m sure I’ve worked all the kinks out.

I’m going to make some final tweaks tomorrow, like making the end cutscene skippable. Then I’ll put up a site and start uploading the game to portals on Wednesday. o_o

Aug 20 2011

OMINOUS HUM

Just a little update – I’m poking Reels of Steel again, experimenting with music and the general feel of it. I’m borrowing a trick from Rez and the way the music builds up in the first stage, building from a simple regular kick thud up to something more complex. Flash doesn’t actually allow you to stitch together procedural tracks in an interesting way, like Rez does, but I can combine basic drum beats and bass drones with occasional musical stings. So that’s what I’m doing!

I also now have Suicidal Torpedo Robot Fish.

In Vigilance news: I’m going to be releasing without a sponsor, so hold on while I drop in some ad code and set up a home page for it 😀

And one last thing… if you play Starcraft II, I’m working on a little pet project: a rule set for handicapping which lets stronger players play with weaker players without throwing everything off. I’ll be looking for beta testers soonish, on EU.