The Next One: Blast Wave 2

Well we have already started development on what will be the next game. Oliver and I have decided to give one of my old titles Blast Wave a bit of a spruce up. We felt that the game had a good solid style with unique elements, the only thing that let it down was its poor graphics / user interface. So as this time around I have an excellent artist we think it can be given the breath of life it deserves.

We started by looking at various parts of the game and what we think let the game down...

Did You Know 3.0...

Abit old I know but I only just stumbled across it, very interesting watch, but does anyone else feel a little unsettled after watching it?

How to tell if you cat is plotting to kill you...

Artificial Games Redecorated

Well I think it was about time I gave www.artificialgames.co.uk abit of a spit shine. For this overhall I went for a minimalist theme by Chris Wallace. I decided to ditch the news updates and just keep it as a portfolio to my flash games and projects.

Funky Javascript Trick

Ha! Tuhoojabotti just informed me of this neat little trick. If you are on Firefox stick the following into the address bar and hit enter.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable=true; document.designMode=on; void 0

Now see that you can move the images about and change the text on the page. No idea why you would want to, but its cool nonetheless.

Thinking about it, I guess this is how google docs works under the hood?

Domains..

Noticed yesterday that http://www.particleplayground.com was available so it got my thought train going. I wonder if...

The first step, as someone pointed out, was to buy the domain. So I am now the proud owner of http://www.particleplayground.com and http://www.particleplayground.co.uk, yey for me!

I probably wont do anything with them but you never know!

Flash Develop Plugin: Go To Definition

Go To Definition
I love the Ctrl & click feature in Eclipse/Netbeans and the Go To Definition feature in Visual Studio and have decided to implement them in Flash develop. After an evening or so of trying to write this myself I come accross the "ASComplete.DeclarationLookup()" method. To my great astonishment, this does exactly what I want. So thankyou to Philippe or whoever wrote this method and did all the hardwork of the plugin for me ;)

Screenshot



DLL
http://www.mikecann.co.uk/Files/GoToDefinition.dll

Source
http://www.mikecann.co.uk/Files/GoToDefinition_source.zip

Post
http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4722

EDIT:
It appears that the same functionality is built as standard into FD with the use of the F4 key. Oh well, you can still use this as a shortcut ;)

Monkey Mines

Well here it is at last! Finally after almost a month of wheeling and dealing we have at last released Monkey Mines to the world at large.

What is it? Well its a remake of the classic Minesweeper game, but with a few changes. Rather than being top-down we have done it in an isometric fashion. Im not sure how successfull this has been as some have reported that it makes the game harder to play being isometric.

The game started off as a small tech-demo of the liquid like motion produced by coupling the cubes together by springs in a tight grid. (I still have that demo and may release the source in a later post if others are interested). We thought for a while about how to turn the demo into a game and ended up on the idea of a Minesweeper game.

It taken a long time to do this one, much longer than i had originally hoped for. I hope that the next game wont take anywhere near as long :P

Let me know what you think!

Highlight Selected Plugin, updated by David Hancock

This sort of things brings a big smile to my face; I got an excellent email yesterday from a chap named Dave Hancock asking my permission to post an update he had made to my Highlight Selected plugin.

Its an excellent upgrade and brings some extra features that were lacking in my very basic version.

Copy / Paste of his update:

Liked the plugin so much I decided to add a few features! Posting here with Mike's permission.

Screenshot


Updates
Added 4 plugin setting options:

Highlight Color (Choose a color for the highlight)
Highlight Whole Words (Choose whether to highlight whole words only or include partial text)
Match Case (Choose whether to match the case of the selection or not)
Add Line Marker (Display a line marker next to highlighted text)

No longer highlights white-space characters

Installation
+ Open FlashDevelop, Click Tools -> Application Files
+ Copy the DLL to the "Plugins" directory
+ Restart FlashDevelop

DLL
http://gonegothic.com/files/flashdevelo ... ection.dll

Source
http://gonegothic.com/files/flashdevelo ... ection.zip