So I’m not dead, apparently – just really, really busy finishing college (which, by the way, I graduate from this upcoming weekend).

But who cares, right?  My latest Flash game has finally been released after being sponsored by PlayBerry.com.  After a few good months of lots of on and off work, Weapons on Wheels 2 is finally available to the public.  Play it here!

Anyone even remotely following this blog of mine knows this game has been in production for quite a long time, with many development posts and alpha videos being released periodically.  I’m very proud of it and while it may be a bit difficult at first, I believe anyone willing to give the game a chance and warm up to it will have a grand ol’ time playing it.

Oh, and here’s the trailer for anyone who wants to check it out.

And I know I’ve posted this image on the left before, but I just love the contrast between my first game vs. my most recent game.  Some really good stuff right there.

Oh, and a big shout-out to the Starling framework.  My first time using it and everything went very smoothly!

More information soon on future projects when I get some free time.  Now that college is over, I get to enter the real world.  You know, whatever that means.

One more time, play the game here!  Release on NewGrounds and other big-name portals coming soon.

Barring any unforeseen circumstances or potential bugs / required fixes, the game is pretty much done.  Isn’t that nifty?

Now, it’s not up for bidding on FGL.com yet, mainly because it took too long for me to get everything 100% ready.  At first, I couldn’t get the encryption software I typically use (secureSWF) to function properly, it kept producing a blank SWF file.  Then, after getting by that by using the online encryption service FGL provides, I noticed the game undergoes a minimal amount of lag only when hosted on FGL.com (the game would bounce around 50 – 55fps but never reach 60fps like it does when played locally or hosted elsewhere).

I eventually narrowed the problem down to the online encryption service mentioned earlier.  I’m actually currently in the process of tweaking the encryption levels and re-uploading the game over and over to determine what exactly causes the lag.  Once I’m done here, I think I’ll be good to go.

However, I won’t click “enable bidding” until Sunday.  Thing is, with it being Thursday, the game won’t be approved and sent out in emails until Friday afternoon at the earliest.  In my opinion, I’d rather wait until Sunday and have the game approved Monday, you know, fresh work week, new monthly budgets, etc…  I don’t want to screw this up and give myself a disadvantage with that initial rush of views games get when they first get approved.

Anyway, here are some of the promotional material I’ve created over the weekend:

Trailer

Screenshots

Tomorrow I begin work on my next project, more details soon, of course.

So, another two weeks just gone like that.  Last week was actually my birthday, and keeping up with the usual tradition, I was as sick as I’ve ever been in quite a while.  Seems about right.

Anyway, as a result, this post was delayed a week to today.  First off, there’s not much to report – at least not much in terms of pictures or video.

A few days ago I implemented the preloader, splash screens, and the pause menu for the game and, to be honest, it was all pretty simple.  I guess I’m finally getting the hang of this programming thing.  That’s about as far as I went with actual coding, though (there’s not much more to do other than implement the remaining levels and bug-test).

Game Levels

Over this past weekend, I spent a good portion of my time creating the basic foundation (read: the bland, uncolored roads and walls, no design elements yet) of each of the remaining eight levels.  This will result in a final total of twelve levels, which I think is a perfect amount for the game.  Eight levels just didn’t feel right and ten levels wouldn’t make sense (since, in the game, I’m bunching levels in groups of four).

This decision comes with a price, though.  No matter what I do at this point, even with all of my past optimizations still in place, the game will be over 10MB.  Oh well, I tried my best.

I tried to avoid going over 10MB because I feel anything bigger than that will inhibit viral distribution.  On the other hand, every “big” Flash game I know of has a file size of over 10MB, so there’s that, right?  (Note: I know big file does not instantly equal great game, I’m just saying.)  Plus, like I said, I needed more levels, there’s nothing I can do.

I plan to spend this week (into and including next weekend) designing and “building” the remaining levels (drawing the visual aspects you’ll see in-game, placing trees, building the walls, etc).  This is kind of a tedious process, so doing it for a batch of eight levels doesn’t sound like too much fun, but I’ll do my best to get it done as soon as I can.  If everything goes well, the game should be near 95-100% complete by Monday.  My goal right now is to get all the levels implemented, balancing the game and bug-testing as I go along, and have it uploaded to FlashGameLicense.com for sponsorship on Tuesday of next week.

So yeah, that’s about all of that.  In other news, I got a Nexus 10 tablet for my birthday.  Didn’t expect that, I’ve never been one to want a tablet, I don’t know, I never got into that craze.  However, after playing around with it, I have to admit, it is pretty awesome.  I’m already planning my next game project and it’s definitely going to be an Android game (for tablets) using Adobe Air and the Starling framework.

Alright, that’s that.  Time to get to work on these levels.

So, guys, crazy story – I totally forgot my password to log into the site here and post an update for the past two months.  Crazy, right?

I’ll make up for it with a new video showcasing the first two levels (there are currently four) and some of the weapons:

I just recently got finished implementing sounds and, wow, do they make such a difference.  It sounds like a war-zone at times and it really brings the game alive.

I’m now at a point where I can really see the finish line (sorry) coming into view.  As a quick overview, the meat of all that’s really left to do is to tweak the enemy AI and allow them to “buy” and use weapons.  Oh, and create the remaining levels, which is causing me an issue.

I’d really love 12 levels, 10 levels minimum, but at the rate I’m going (in terms of file-size) I’ll be lucky to get 8.  Right now, the file-size of a release build is about 9.0MB.  From what I understand about Flash games, 10MB is pretty much the understood limit for most games, with some notable exceptions, of course (large RPGs, huge tower-defense games, etc).  This is because a smaller file-size equals easier and wider distribution (bandwidth, portal upload restrictions, etc).

This leaves me with two options.  I’m going to either going to down the quality of the sounds / music / graphics and try to squeeze 8 or 10 levels into the game, or I’m going to just bite the bullet and end up with a 12MB game.  (I believe Weapons on Wheels 1 was actually 10.6MB, and that’s still my most popular game ever, still being played today!)

Anyway, it won’t be so long until my next update.  To be completely honest, this one took so long because I wanted to wait until I implemented some sounds.  As it turns out, I kept pushing it off later and later because of other things I was working on.  Eventually, two months later, I finally dedicated a day or two and added sounds to the game.

Okay bye, go play Weapons on Wheels 1 (why do the cars move so slow in that game?).

This is a little something I was having trouble with just now.  I thought there was some built-in functionality for this somewhere, but apparently there is not.  Also Google searches trying to find an existing solution turned up nothing, so I’m putting it here for anyone who may need this in their projects.

This simply returns the actual key value given a certain keyCode.  (For example, pass in 32 and get “Spacebar” in return.)  There is a built-in function, String.fromCharCode(), but I found this only works with the letter / number keys and not “special” keys like escape, shift, control, and most importantly – the arrow keys.

Create the Dictionary object:

Function to retrieve from the Dictionary object:

That’s all there is to it.  Sure it was tedious, but I’m sure this will be useful for displaying what keys are pressed on the screen, etc…