Flashteroids is out... finally!

Yep, thats right, its taken me months of hard effort and stress but i have finally done it. Im in two minds about this one, it looks nice and its got quite abit of new tech in it but the gameplay is kinda tricky to pickup due to the 3d nature.

Anyways enough chatter, game follows...

Flashteroids 3D (teaser)

A quick little teaser of my next flash game.. ;)

GameJacket

Well today is my second day at my new job and as i havent mentioned my employment change on this blog yet i thought its about time to post about it.

One month ago i decided to leave Dubit and head back to manchester to join Barry and chums at GameJacket. My reasons for this abrupt change after such a short period at Dubit (4 months) are numerous. Mostly it has to do with what I wanted to achieve in the future and the type of projects i want to be a part of. At GameJacket im to be a flash swiss-army-knife of sorts so should keep me on my toes and constantly challenged. In addition to that I am to be working part time of my own volition so i can concentrate atleast part of my working week on developing my own games under the name Artificial Games.

Two days in and im thoroughly enjoying myself and im sure now i have made the right move. Anyways enough chat heres a pic of my new office:

ArtificialGames.co.uk & Site Changes

Well i have now finished moving about and have set up a home for Artificial Games.

I have also been forced to remove the comunity mixes from this site due to restriced hosting space, oh well i would preferr good hosting over infinate space.

Undergoing Renovations

I have decided to dump my crappy streamline.net hosting and go for something a little better.

Im going to be making a large overhall to this site and setting up a new site dedicated to Artificial-Games, bear with me ;)

Im Famous!

... well im on the front page of the gamejacket homepage, im not exactly A-list now but its better than nothing ;)

Source: http://www.gamejacket.com/news.asp?news=7

 

Malta '08

Well im back from my excellent holiday in Mata with my little lady. I havent uploaded pics to my picassa account for a while so i thought i would take this oppertunity to do so and upload some holiday snaps at the same time ;)

Highlights include:

 

From Malta08

1,000,000 Views!!

Normally when i post a big number like that its followed by the word "particles" but surprisingly this time it followed by the word "views". Why? Well i have (probably a few days ago now) broken my 1 million plays cherry on 4 flash games.

To be fair the majority of these have come from my latest game IcySlicy (670k and counting), but im still pretty proud of the number. Im hoping my next game will do over a million by itself, but then again it could just get two plays :P

Yhazee Strikes Again!

Prolly his funniest one yet i think :P 

Icy Slicy

Well after weeks and weeks of having the game all but finished i have finally sorted out the sponsorship, ironed out the bugs (most of them) and sorted all the artwork. The game is now released and ready to be sliced up by critics on the internet.

Anyways onto the game; The object of the game is simple. Several silly critters and their things have gotten frozen in  the ice and they need your help to cut them out. Using your mouse slice off chunks of ice in this exciting physics based game!

My Workspace

Continuing on from the previous post i thought i would just quickly post a picture of my new workspace at Dubit :)

My new flat

Well i have been living in my new pad in Leeds for going on 4 weeks. Loving the wide open space and the convenience of it to everything else.

Anyways here is a video i took to show potential flatmates on Gumtree:

 

New 'Games' Page

Just a quick one to say i have added a 'games' page at the top for quick reference by myself in my flash games to all the other games by myself.

LAN08

Well i just got back from the geek-based crazyness that is the stourbridge LAN party. Despite having the worlds word journey getting down there i still had a bloody good time. As usual pictures and videos on picassa, heres a lil sample:

 

 

FlashDevelop, Preloaders and GameJacket

This is a clone of the post i made on the GameJacket developer forums here: http://gamejacket.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=59 but i think it deserves a re-post here so it can be googled :)

 As i had quite abit of trouble getting GameJacket to fit into my work flow properly and have no finally managed it I have decided to share my experiences and write a tutorial.

So this is a tutorial for using FlashDevelop with the Flex Complier to build a game with a pre-loader that passes the GameJacket security checks.

Blast Out

Well here is my next flash based offering...

Its called blast out and the idea is its a modern day version of Break Out. You have to bounce the ball around (which you may recognise from Blast Wave ;)) and destroy the terrain to release the particles. You can collect the particles by holding the left mouse to attract them down to your paddle.

This is actually a much smaller version than the "full" game that i wrote. I originally intended to allow users to make thier own levels in-game which they could then share with others. Unfortunately however flash doesnt allow cross-domain file sharing so i had to cut all that beautiful WORKING code out at the last minute :(

Oh well, i think whats left is still pretty good, hope you enjoy it too!

Oh P.S. if you want to help me out head over to the Newgrounds site and vote me a 5 :D http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/442942

My Flat!

Well i have now found a new job at a company called Dubit in Leeds, it looks to be an excellent company, looking forward to working there.

But it also means that i have to go flat hunting again and I have to leave this excellent flat behind :( To help Michelle out with finding a replacement for me i have decided to resurrect this video to show others.

So if you are interested in this flat smack bang in the centre of Mancheter then send either me (mike.cann@gmail.com) or Michelle (m_blenkharn@hotmail.com) an email.

 

A lil AS3 Performance Testing

While i have been thinking about what im going to work on for my next flash game i have decided to look abit into whether doing destructible landscapes is now feasible with the new (ish) bitmap abilities.

Because of my earlier work on destructible landscapes on LieroXNA i know where the potential performance bottlenecks lie.

One of these is the reading of the pixel data to perform collision checks. This has to be quick as all the objects must check each frame to see if they collide with the terrain and potentially more than one "lookup" must happen to do this (pixel perfect collisions).

Blast Wave

Heres my latest flash based creation, Blast Wave.

This one was a blast to make, no pun intended, and only took 2 weeks. Hope you all enjoy!

To play the game click here!

CodeDrop

Well i have made a decision, instead of starting 10000 projects and never finishing i have decided instead to do some quick projects and shoot them out the door. So the best way to do this i figure is to make flash games.

So here is my first flash game of a few. Its basically a port of a game i did in the first year of uni in DarkBASIC but with some modifications.

Hope you all enjoy it :)

CLICK HERE TO PLAY THE GAME

Site-Redesign

Well, i have had another one of my site-moves around, hope you like it :D

Redundency is Great

Well thats it for my time at Rockpool Games.

Since friday the 28th of March Eidos (owners of Rockpool Games) are making thier mobile department redundant.

Its not all doom and gloom however as we all have 90 days remaining fully paid and redundency payments ontop of that, so as today is the first day since the news broke on friday we have been doing very little. I have even had time to build myself a little fort and declare myself the ruler of of this part of the office.

PlaceEd 3

Recently I have been working on some small tools for the lads at work to aid them in designing mobile phone games.

One project I have been working on for a while (in my spare time at work and in the evenings at home) is a new version of PlaceEd. PlaceEd is a small app used by people at work who need to design levels with objects and paths in them.

The reason for making this new version was because the original was starting to show its age and after several modifications to customise it to certain projects it has become unreliable. A second version (PlaceEd2) was half coded by one of the other employees at rockpool though they ran out of time and didn’t complete it.

So that’s where I come in, and I wrote from scratch a new app and called it PlaceEd 3 (even though there wasn’t really a fully released version of PlaceEd 2).

XNALiquids 03

Well i was just thinking in work today that it may be possible to detect the bounds of the the particle "clusters" and then line drawing the boundry and then you wouldnt notice the compression that the particles tend to suffer from.

When i got home i tested out my theroy and the results can be seen below. Its pretty obvious that its not perfect but as i say it was just me messing.

Oh BTW grant kot has been working on his polluted planet some more, and its starting to look quite impressive now its over in XNA: link1, link2

XNALiquids02

Okay well i have been playing around with my particles AGAIN :P

I started this time from some work done by the CUDA team over at NVidia. As im running windows Vista i couldnt get CUDA to work so i read through the source and adapted it to my needs.

As you can see from the video below its better than my last attempt but still not perfect, it also still runs on  the CPU on a single core and has had no optomisations applied to it.

Hopefully tho i can build on this to make it better.

XNALiquids 01

Well after seeing what Polluted Planet did with large numbers of interactive particles in java, it got me interested.

So i have decided to have a go at implementing it myself in XNA.

So here it is, my first attempt at it. Currently the algorithm is very rough as you can see from the video there are still some problems that cause the particle to behave a little... umm.. erratic ;)

Hopefully with abit more time and effort ill get it sorted. At the moment there are 5000 interacting particle on one CPU, hopefully i will beable to push that figue up soon and take advantage of my quad-core system :)

Polluted Planet

I stumbled accross this yesterday and thought it was too good not to comment on it.

 

 

You know me how i love particles, and this is just particle crazy!

And the amasing thing is it was written in java!

You can grab the game here: http://pollutedplanet.googlepages.com/