BrokenBlog

The serial you get works on the Linux version, which is currently in alpha. Get your serial here. Thanks to Colin Moock for pointing it out.

A while back Andrew Dickman and I tried making games together as an artist/programmer duo.

This is easily the best thing I think we came up with because it’s the most fun to look at and play in its incomplete state. I wrote some decent AI for the game, which I’ve never actually beaten on the hardest difficulty. The gameplay is basically identical to Puyo Puyo, otherwise known as Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine and Kirby’s Avalanche.

Use the arrow keys to move, and the spacebar to “spin” the blobs. Chain together 4+ blobs of the same color to clear them and any nearby black blobs. You send more black blobs to your enemy the bigger the chain, and way more than that if you pull off combos.

This game is so incomplete you can’t switch between modes in the game, so you’ll have to pick the type of game you want to play from here.

• Computer vs Computer (fun to watch)
• Player vs Computer (easy)
• Player vs Computer (normal)
• Player vs Computer (hard)

When it comes to 2D platformers, there is no better than Yoshi’s Island. It’s innovative, loaded with levels, and just plain fun to play. When I was younger, I went so far as to get 100’s on every level, including the bonus levels.

I was experimenting with tile engines in Flash and I figured it would be very hard, but possible to pull off Yoshi’s Island in Flash. These days, that’s almost easy, but this demo was on the far edge of what Flash 6 was capable of on my old computer. It was reasonable in brief horizontal levels, but slowed way down when in levels involving both axes. I decided to drop it, but I have a special place in my heart for this project, since this is probably the best chunk of code I ever wrote for Flash 6. Ah well. I still gained a lot of experience from it.

Here’s the demo Use the arrow keys to move and Z to jump. Press Z again in mid-air to get Yoshi to float.

You’ll need to view this post in a browser with Javascript and Flash 6 in order to see it.

I’m surprised I’m finding about this now, but during Adobe MAX Chicago Adobe talked about the (possible) use of other languages in Flash, including C/C++. What’s worse is they had a killer example of the technology. Quake.

It’s located here. Towards the end of the second video.

It is in fact Quake, not Quake II, unless I’m going crazy. I honestly have no idea quite how they pulled it off. Sure having a C/C++ compiler for Flash and a nice 3D api would help, but it’s got sound and everything. The only way I got sound to work in my Doom port was by converting them (the hard way) to Sound instances, but sound in Quake is streaming. Fullscreen in Flash 9 uses DirectX now, are they using the DirectX with the 3D api in fullscreen too? Are we able to stream sound, rather than convert it? I can’t quite understand how they did it. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.