The main concept is that the player’s actions effect the movement of the blocks to be avoided. This in essence makes the player their own worst enemy. I was experimenting around with nested spring feedback systems and this concept of player as AI when I stumbled upon a fun and playable prototype that went on to become this game.

I spent about 7 days developing the version I submitted to the Experimental Gameplay Project website and then I worked for a bit longer polishing it up to get it ready to seek sponsorship.  I’m happy to report that Armor Games picked up the primary sponsorship on it and Contentric officially launched yesterday!

It was great to work with Dan from Armor Games and I definitely recommend them to any other flash developers out there who are looking for a good sponsor.

I’m really quite happy with how this game came together.  I was able to get a ton of playtesting feedback early on which really helped me perfect the gameplay to where I wanted it.  I also got to write the music for the game which people seem to be enjoying as well so that is always a treat.

Here is a gameplay trailer I put together with some rough edits that show me getting a little over 13,000 points.

As usual I welcome any feedback positive or negative and would love to hear from you.

Dave has been too busy in the game development trenches to update this blog recently so as an ambitious underling I am stepping up. If I do a good job perhaps I won’t be vaporized at the end of the day!

What has been going on lately? Well–many things!

Hybrid Mind Studios is now officially an LLC. Dave was excited to take that step this February after a successful first year in 2009 that saw the release of six Flash games and one iPhone game.

Since his return in March from the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference Dave has been hard at work on three new games.

Two of these games have been finished and will be launching any day now.  The third game still requires a bit more time in the oven though.

Dave did have a chance to tell me that both the Flash Gaming Summit and the Independent Games Summit in March really inspired him and made him thankful to be part of such an exciting profession!

He got to meet many fellow independent game developers as well as meet many of the publishers that have sponsored or licensed his games over the past year. That was quite a treat as normally there is little face to face contact when working from a home office.

Well–that’s all I have time for this morning. There will be more updates soon as the new games fire from the studio launch tubes. Let’s hope I don’t get vaporized for taking the initiative and updating this blog for Dave!

My Flash game Robot Reaction is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

You can play the free Flash version of the iPhone game at robotreaction.com and buy the game for 99 cents in the App Store. I worked on the iPhone version in collaboration with One App At A Time.

The goal is to try and blow up as many robots as you can in ten fast paced rounds. There are six different robot types which all explode in different ways.

Here is a gameplay video of the iPhone version in action:

Concept:

Help the atom on each level recover its lost electrons! You only have 60 seconds total to collect all 100 missing electrons from the different levels.

The screenshot above shows 4 of the 20 available levels.  10 levels are picked at random each time you play.  The entire game only lasts 60 seconds (as per the contest rules.)

I created the background textures by cropping and filtering some lovely watercolor textures made by Hillary Luetkemeyer.  The artist released them for use and remix under a CC Attribution license.

Feel free to leave any feedback below in the comments.

Play Power Vacuum

This is a little demo I made this morning as a way to get a viewport concept working for the latest game I am developing.  I’ve done a few viewport type projects in other languages but had not implemented one in Flash AS3 yet.

This demo creates 300 random balls and sets them in motion inside the world.  The world’s dimensions are four times larger than the viewport above.

You can click in the window above and use the arrow keys to move the viewport around the world.  The source files for this tutorial are available at the end of the article.

BACKGROUND

I needed to be able to have world coordinates for my latest game along with a viewport which follows the player.  All the objects in the world must move according to various physics and be able to be mapped into the current viewport for display purposes.  After hacking around for a while unsuccessfully last night on the game code I realized this morning that it would just be better to start fresh on a little proof of concept demo until I had it all working.

I thought I’d share some of the concepts in case it could help someone else as well as get any code or design feedback from anyone who may have implemented these in a different or more efficient way.  I can already think of a ton of improvements my rudimentary solution could use but I’ll add them as necessary.

BASIC DOCUMENT CLASS VARS AND CONSTANTS:

// Viewport related constants:
private static const VIEWPORT_WIDTH:Number = 350;
private static const VIEWPORT_HEIGHT:Number = 300;
private static const VIEW_STEP:int = 25;

// World related constants:
public static const WORLD_WIDTH:Number = 1400;
public static const WORLD_HEIGHT:Number = 1200;

// Current viewport coords:
private var viewportX:Number;
private var viewportY:Number;

INITIAL SETUP OF VIEWPORT AND CREATING CIRCLES WITHIN WORLD:

This snippet is occurring inside an init() function that is called from the document class constructor. This is all one time setup.

// set view port coords to middle of world:
viewportX = WORLD_WIDTH / 2;
viewportY = WORLD_HEIGHT / 2;

// create a bunch of random circles scattered across the world:
circles = new Array();
for (var i:int = 0; i < NUM_CIRCLES; i++) {
var circle:Circle = new Circle();

// grab random x that falls within world space:
var wX:Number = GameUtils.randRange(0 + (circle.width / 2), WORLD_WIDTH - (circle.width / 2));

// grab random y that falls within world space:
var wY:Number = GameUtils.randRange(0 + (circle.height / 2), WORLD_HEIGHT - (circle.height / 2));

// set the coordinates for our circle:
circle.placeInWorld(wX, wY);

// add our circle to the display list:
addChild(circle);

// push our circle onto our array of circles:
circles.push(circle);

SNIPPET OF HANDLING KEYBOARD INPUT TO MOVE THE VIEWPORT:

This snippet is occurring inside a keyDown listener function which listens for the user hitting the arrow keys.  Each time the keys are hit it moves the viewport in the appropriate direction while performing range checking with the world borders.

if (e.keyCode == 38) {            // UP
 viewportY -= VIEW_STEP;
 if (viewportY < 0) { viewportY = 0; }
}

MAIN PROGRAM LOOP:

This is a simple enterFrame listener that loops through all the active circles and calls their update method. After the update method we alter the coordinates of the parent display object (in this case the instance of our viewport) inversely with the viewport coordinates. This allows Flash to automatically handle updating all the positions of the circles which are children of our viewport instance. Thanks to draknek for this elegant suggestion!

private function enterFrameListener(e:Event):void {
	for (var i:int = 0; i < circles.length; i++) {
		circles[i].update();
	}

	// pan the viewport
	x = -viewportX;
	y = -viewportY;
}

CIRCLE CLASS VARS:

Here are the variables that define my circle class.  This class is pretty basic and nothing too special has to happen here with regards to the viewport. The class will have to perform range checking with the borders of the world.

// Velocity:
private var velX:Number;
private var velY:Number;

CIRCLE UPDATE METHOD:

Here is a snippet from the update method that gives the basic idea of how to adjust the coords while range checking against the larger world borders.

// Adjust the x coord by current x velocity:
x += velX;

// Perform boundary checking with world borders and adjust
// position and velocity direction accordingly:
if (x < (width / 2)) {
	x = (width / 2);
	velX = -velX;
} else if (x > ViewPort.WORLD_WIDTH - (width / 2)) {
	x = ViewPort.WORLD_WIDTH - (width / 2);
	velX = -velX;
}

So that is my concept of one way to do a basic viewport in AS3.  I am happy to get any feedback on this code and the way I solved this problem.  I know there are many ways to implement these things but this is what I am going to run with for now as it seems to be working pretty good!

EDIT: Thank you to Draknek (see comments below) for an elegant refinement to my code that allowed me to no longer have to track world coordinates on the child objects. Now I can just let Flash handle updating all the positions for me by moving the parent display object instead of manually doing that.

Download the v0.2 source files and fla for this tutorial

I have just completed a new Flash game called Worderfall this month with my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P. Bushnell.  This time around it is a word game that utilizes an extremely large database of valid English words.

The concept is a fairly simple one.  You have three minutes to create as many high scoring words as you can.  The game increases pace with each minute that passes.  There are a ton of game statistics that are tracked as well for those who would like to improve their scores or at least measure their progress.

Here is a game play video which explains how to play:

Here is a game play screenshot:

I welcome your feedback and thoughts positive or negative.  Thanks for giving it a try!

My idea on the theme was that you play as the cavern.  You have to use your natural defenses like stalactites and steam vents to eliminate the creatures that have come to call you home.  In this version you are mainly facing off against bats and cavemen though in an expansion I hope to add in many time periods of history of various cavern dwellers and users.

Here is a scene from level 5.  There are currently only 5 levels in the game.  You have limited amount of time on each level to try and destroy as many creatures as you can.  There is a nice combo system and random bonus creatures that will help you go for some big points.  There is also a completion bonus with extra rewards for perfect completion.  To encourage some friendly competition I tied in MochiMedia’s excellent global leaderboard system and even wrote up a simple leaderboard tutorial ahead of the competition in case any other LD15 participants who used Flash wanted to give it a go.

Once again Ludum Dare was an absolute blast!  There was record turn out like last time and 144 games were submitted in total!  You can view the current game list here.  My LD15 dev blog can be viewed here too.

I used the Flash CS4 IDE to develop this game in Actionscript 3.0. I also used SFXR to generate the sound effects and composed the menu and level music in Reason.  You can even view a timelapse of my games 36 hours of creation compressed into 3 minutes!  Congrats to all the participants of Ludum Dare 15!

Click here to give Angry Caverns a try in your browser!

PLAY:

Play Blinkout

DESCRIPTION:
How good is your visual memory under pressure? You’ll have to use both your agility and good resource strategy to navigate your spaceship through an increasingly hostile dimension. How far can you get?

INSTRUCTIONS:

• Move ship with ARROWS
• Illuminate levels with the SPACEBAR (costs energy)
• Find the key and go to the gate
• Regain energy by picking up charges
• There are 8 levels that will repeat for 6 rounds. The charges are persistent across all rounds, so don’t use all of them the first time around…

MORE INFO:

I hope you’ll find Blinkout to be a fairly original game. The game is designed to challenge the player on quite a few levels and we believe that if players spend a little time with it they will find an interesting experience as the game mechanics change over the 6 rounds of 8 repeating level mazes.

The player will have to use their visual memory as most of the game is played in complete darkness. Illumination of the levels comes through collecting energy charges along the way. The catch is that these charges are persistent across all the rounds so a charge collected earlier will no longer be available when encountered again. Charges picked up later are worth more energy so the player will be able to manage their resources accordingly to make it to the harder rounds. In these later rounds the player is faced with greater energy costs for hitting a maze wall as well as greater costs for illuminating the level. The level time limit reduces and the movement speed increases. We realize this game is quite challenging and will likely intimidate at first as using visual memory, keyboard agility, and resource management together may prove to be a new experience for many players.

I worked on Blinkout with my good friend and fellow game designer Jeremy P. Bushnell. It marks my first collaboration and the experience was quite enjoyable. Jeremy took lead on the art direction and level design for the game while I took lead on the programming side of things. We worked equally on the game design and iterations of all the facets through kicking ideas and changes back and forth.  We were also very happy to get the game sponsored by King.com and they have been great to work with.

We hope you enjoy the game!

Spent the past three days cooking up this fun little robot-themed chain reaction game.  I’ve wanted to do a chain reaction game for quite some time and I really wanted to do a side perspective version that explored some fun and quick game play mechanics.  I spent a week or two mulling ideas over in my head before beginning development.  I’m rather happy how this turned out all things considered.

Play it here.

Description:

How good are you with your tongue? Got a bad case of scurvy?

See if you can handle the Orange Frenzy!

Orange You Glad features 20 levels of citrus madness. 10 special power effects and 25 unique and humorous items to avoid. Can you lick enough oranges on each level to advance to the next? It’s not as easy as it sounds.

Play Orange You Glad

Background:

This is my second Flash game and first ActionScript 3.0 game.  This is also my first foray into Flash sponsorship and licensing.  I am quite excited that after putting this game on Flash Game License as well as emailing marketing materials to over 50 sponsors I was able to secure both a primary sponsorship from Flasharcade Gamessite as well as a non-exclusive license from Big Fish Games.

I worked on this game during the month of March and the beginning of April.  It was a little slow going because I was under heavy learning curve from both ActionScript 3.0 and the Flash CS4 IDE.  This project was a great learning experience from both a technical and business aspect.

The game received a few different bids for primary sponsorship on Flash Game License and it only took about two weeks total from posting time till I accepted a favorable bid and delivered the sponsored SWF file.  Both Flasharcade Gamessite and Big Fish Games have been great to work with and I am quite happy with both deals.

My primary sponsorship allows my to sell non-exclusive site-locked licenses and keep my MochiAds which is one of the prime reasons that type of sponsorship model was promoted by Flash Game License.

I am very excited to see how my second game does out there in the wild.  It has been almost 6 weeks since I started this project and it is definitely a test of patience controlling your enthusiasm as you wait for the day you can release your game.