RidTheWorld.org

You should definitely check this site out.  It’s the home of my lover good friend Brandon Ridener.  He’s been working in Flash for as long as I have, but he’s a better procrastinator than I am.  He’s just now finally getting into the groove of things – he just released his first real Flash animation “Scene of the Crime” and is already working on his second.

SMB Interview

This was a really interesting read for me.  Click here to read over a transcript of an interview with the original Super Mario Bros. creators.  It was really fascinating to get to see how these guys think and how they worked together to create the Mario games.  Definitely worth the five minutes to look it over.

Flash MindMeld 2011

Are you interested in making Flash games?  Then this page will be like gold for you.  Dozens of the most famous people in the Flash gaming field contributed small 2-3 minute voice clips giving out some of the knowledge they’ve acquired throughout the years, all for free.

LOL

I’ve been laughing at this video ever since I was linked to it a few days ago by Rid Brandon.  Enjoy.

Quick Note

I just wanted to make a quick note about the site design.  I slightly changed some things around a little, nothing too drastic.  Just a new header and background along with Twitter and Flickr widgets on the top of the page and the sidebar.  Decided to freshen the site up a little for 2011

Alright, that’s it.  Back to work for me…

Me at work.

PS – I scheduled a new post for tomorrow.  Something actually worthwhile to read, so don’t forget to check back.

So when I heard Sonic 4 was going to be released on the Xbox Live Arcade, I was pretty happy that Sega would finally stop abusing the Sonic name and return to his glorious 2D roots.  They want to add some extra polish and “2.5D” elements to the game?  I’m okay with that, as long as it retains it’s classic gameplay.

So I finally fired it up this morning after months of waiting and I knew I was in for some disappointment as soon as level 1 started.

Let’s begin shall we?

One

Firstly, I would like the name of the person on Sonic Team that decided to suggest,

“Hey, you know what’d be a  great addition to this game?  How about if we make Sonic accelerate at the same pace as paint drying?!”

I’d assume this would be the same guy that suggested Sonic come to a dead stop if you release the button for the direction he’s heading in.

Seriously, have these people not plaed the original Sonic games?  Not only does Sonic accelerate slow and stop extremely abruptly, but in general he moves at barely half the pace that he ran at in the original games.

Two.

It’s Robotnik.  Dr. Ivo Robotnik, to be exact.  Not Eggman.  I don’t give a crap if Eggman was in fact his original name in Japan or whatever the story is, here in America his name is Robotnik.  Anyone that says otherwise is mentally challenged.

Three.

I understand the need to update the graphics, but they seriously went overboard.  For one, all of the colors are so bright and shiny it’s borderline annoying.  And two, the updated version of Robotnik and his machines look as if they were designed for infants:

Four

How can no one at Sonic Team see this and speak up…

This makes Sonic look like he’s completely helpless and/or retarded, and to make it worse, Sonic spends at least half the game in this pose.  Last time I checked in the original Sonic games, 90% of the time when Sonic was in the air, he was in HIS BALL FORM.

I can’t count the number of time I went to kill something while in the air only to be hurt and have my rings fly everywhere.  (Also, don’t get me started on the unbelievably horrible way that the rings “scatter around”.  It’s more as if they fall out of you and slowly bounce together in a group on the floor.)

Five

It’s Robotnik.

Six

Enough with the targeting system.  When I first heard this was going to be in the game I was immediately pissed (Or maybe there was a targeting system in the original games, I could be wrong.  /sarcasm).

I decided to give it a chance though, maybe I’d come to like it.

Nah.

Not only is it completely abused and overused, it completely affects (and ruins) the way the game should be played.

Rant done

Alright I’m done.  I really just needed a place to rant about all of this nonsense.  I thought that I was going to be getting a decent Sonic game today, but apparently Sonic Team had other plans.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it, I’m just extremely disappointed.

What would I have wanted?

I wouldn’t have cared if Sonic 4 had the same art, sounds, music, gameplay, etc from the original Sega games.  Just give me some new levels with some new types of enemies/Boss’s and I’d be beyond happy.

PS – Oh yeah, that’s right…  This is by game-dev blog.  Um…  My Christmas-themed game is coming along nicely.  I’ve been making some real headway with it, I can’t wait to release it.

I just wanted to let all of you know that I’m back.  If you didn’t know, I went away last Sunday for a week long family vacation.  It was pretty fun and relaxing, but I’m eager to be back and to get back to work on some Flash projects before reality kicks in with college on August 30th, oh boy!

Here’s a few pictures from where we went, which was Wildwood, NJ, if you’re wondering:

View from the room.

Another view from the room at night.

My brother and I in the front seat of the “Great White.”

That’s us way up there.  See us?  No?  Look harder, dammit!

Picture of the middle pier (there’s 3 in total) from the boardwalk.

Picture of one of the waterparks with the beach in the background.

Another aerial shot of the waterpark/pier.

And one more for good measure.

Anyway, like I said, that was all good and fun, but now it’s back to work.

Also, I didn’t mention this yet, but I put Oil Spill Escape up on NewGrounds.com – http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/543746.

I appreciate any and all 5 ratings!   Thanks.

It’s family vacation time.  Me and the rest of my family will be heading down to Wildwood, NJ for a 5 day vacation starting tomorrow at the ungodly hour of 4:30am.

Just figured I’d let you guys know so you will understand the unusual break in the relentless and consistent daily posts on this site.  (HAHAHAHAHAA!!1).

So yeah, that’s all from me.  See you guys next week!  Well, I’ll type some words and you’ll read them, we won’t necessarily see each other.

Pic related: It’s what will happen to me at the giant slide at Morey’s Piers, most likely.

You’re “job” however, is to simply give us feedback and advice, and work directly with developers to make the games better.

If you are interested, just make a comment.  Be sure to use your real email address when commenting (in the email field, don’t actually post your email).

I’ll decide who I give it to, muahahaha.

Unrelated news:

My secret project has a sponsor.  I’m actually working on the Flash file right now adding branding logos stuff like that.  It should be released on the sponsor’s site any day now.

As most of you know, I just recently completed my “secret project” game which is currently undergoing bidding on FlashGameLicense.com.  I have the bidding scheduled to be over by this time next week and from then it’s just a matter of how fast me and the winning sponsor can communicate before I can release the game.  I’m predicting a release over next weekend (not the weekend that starts tomorrow).

In the meantime, I’ve already started working on Hero Dude all over again (hence the 1% up there in the header).  I’ve slightly altered the art style of the main character and have come up with a basic plot for the whole game.  It’ll be a fun and short platformer, with just one level.  A big level, granted, but it still shouldn’t take longer than 10 minutes to reach the end of it, mostly because you’ll only have 10 minutes to reach the end or you fail .

So if you’ll excuse me, I have this game that won’t be programming itself.

It’s gonna be a very classic and comical  2D platformer.  I’m working on it every day, making pretty good headway.

More updates coming up later.

In other news, I’ve spent the past 10 hours in a ustream chatroom waiting for Shay Carl and his wife to have their fourth kid. I went as far as leaving my computer on next to my head while I slept so when Shay started a quick live feed on ustream or tweeted a message I’d wake up.

Yeah. This can’t be healthy in any way.

For those of you that don’t know who Shay is, for shame….

Nah not really. Just been busy. Finished my final week of the my first year of college on Thursday, so now that’s out of the way.

Game Stuff

I really should’ve updated you guys on what’s been going on with the game, because even though I said it was done, apparently the game itself had other ideas.

What happened is I finished the game on May 2nd. I began emailing sponsors on May 4th or so. Then on May 5th I found out my game is broken in the beta version of Flash Player 10.1.  Even though it’s a beta version, lots of people still run it, so I had to find a fix.

It took me until today to fix it.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  For one, I haven’t really worked on trying to fix it too much since finals were taking up most of my time.  Also it wasn’t even me that fixed it.  It seems I alerted the engineers over at Adobe about this when I made a topic about it on the Adobe forums.  They ended up fixing it in a new release candidate that was released yesterday.

Also, look who has held the high score for the past month. Not to toot my own horn, but I pwn noobs at this game.

Just listed the game at FlashGameLicense.com today and also am awaiting a response from Luis/Tom over at NewGrounds to see if they’re interested in sponsoring the game.

CS5 Stuff

About two or so weeks ago I treated myself for completing Weapons on Wheels by buying myself Flash CS5 and Photoshop CS5.  Feels good man.

For all you of that are planning on acquiring these programs by other methods, I don’t want to sound like I’m being a total hypocrite and talking down to you. I’m not gonna lie, I pirated Flash and Photoshop before. But now that I’m older and am going to be really focusing on using them to bring in some income, it’d be stupid not to invest a few bucks into legally owning the products. (Plus I’m now eligible for the education discount .)

Lost Stuff

Dude. Lost ends on Sunday. As in “goes away forever”-ends. The series-friggen-finale. I can’t even describe how much Lost is nearly an addiction to me right now.

I’m looking forward to it like you wouldn’t believe, but at the same time I never want it to get it.  Weird stuff I know.  No matter how it ends I’m still gonna love the series.  That’s not implying that I don’t have faith that the writers are gonna end it in an amazing way, I’m sure they will.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll be watching the 2 hour pilot episode of Lost on ABC and then Sunday I think I have a total of 6 or so hours of Lost stuff to watch including the 2.5 hour series finale and the 2 hour “post-game show” that airs before it.

New Game Stuff

Working on art for it.  Have a vague idea for it. Gonna be a fun retro-sort of platformer. More news on that later.

Lol 521 words in this post so far. That’s enough from me. Bye etc…

But still, that’s a good thing, no?

Once it’s done the next thing on my list is to get a sponsor, then the game will be released.  How long that will take I couldn’t tell you.

Anyway, let’s get on to some news.

Yep, that was a big milestone in the process of making the game.  The levels each took at least an hour each to make.  In total there are 12, so, let’s see.  Hmm…  So it took at least 12 hours of work just to make the levels.  LOL MATH.

Making them was only half the battle too, once they were made (in Photoshop) I still had to “import” them into the game.  (Create the walls, the “dirt”, the checkpoints, etc, etc… in Flash.)  It really was a monotonous and long process.

New Site Design

In case you’re hard of seeing, I put up a new design on the site.  I was pretty happy when I found this theme.  Usually when I see a nice theme there’s usually a price tag on it.  The header and background image were all me though (NO WAY RALPH, REALLY?!).

PS-Ever since I updated the ShadowBox plugin for WordPress, the crap doesn’t work anymore, as is usually the case whenever you update a plugin, which is why I tend to never do it.  So excuse any bugs in viewing .SWF’s or images.

Flash CS5

I want it.  Same with Photoshop CS5.  I think they’re available for purchase as of 2 days ago, but you can’t actually get them for a month or so.  I think, could be wrong about this.  Either way, I want them both.  If I get a decent sponsorship for this game I’ll gladly invest the money into getting them (at the education discount, of course ).

Apple

Can suck a bag of dicks.

Steve Jobs

Can choke on a bag of dicks.

Why all the hate for Apple all of a sudden?  Because of this shit Jobs pulled just a day before the CS5 Suite became available saying that that they will not allow apps made with Flash CS5′s new Flash-to-iPhone export feature into their app store.

It’s one thing that they disallow apps made in Flash (or any other platform other than what Apple specifies), but to do it a day before Flash CS5 is ready for purchase, that’s just a real scumbag move.  The Flash-to-iPhone export feature was one of the most-hyped-about features in all of the Adobe CS5 Suite and Apple just basically shoved a giant middle finger right up Adobe’s ass.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say about all of that.  I’ll have an update once the game is completed.  Hopefully some time this weekend.