Check out what I have so far here.  To move, use the left / right arrow keys, space to jump, shift to run, and push against a wall to slide down / wall jump.  These controls will be remapped for the actual game, as I’ve worked in mouse control so I’m going to have to abandon the arrow keys for a WASD-based control scheme.

Today I intend on implementing the Starling API, which is a 2D API built on top of the Stage3D API introduced in Flash Player 11.  If you didn’t know, Stage3D is a new feature in Flash Player will allows for programmers to harness the power of the GPU and create more stunning visuals with little to no impact on the CPU.  (This means be on the look out for some really amazing 3D Flash games in the coming months.)

I generally dislike working with APIs for two main reasons.  One, I like to know what things are doing and why they’re doing it, and there’s no better way to know this than actually coding the classes yourself.  The second reason is because of the possibility for lots of unnecessary overhead and lack of optimization (again, I pretty much don’t trust anyone to do anything right, except for me – sometimes).  Since Starling was actually developed by the same team that actually work on Flash Player, I’m very comfortable with using it.

Alright, that’s it for now.  I’m seriously going to try to get more posts out than these minor once-a-week things.  It’s easy to say that now, on a weekend, but once the week begins it’s a different story…

Okay go away now.

Before I get into some development news and updates, let’s go over some stats:

• This site is over 2 years old. Time really flies sometimes. I remember when I bought this domain off a whim after I sold ForTheLose.org (now dead, sadly).
• This is the 100th post. Figuring that the site has been live for roughly 790 days (since the first post), I have a post-per-day ratio of 0.12. (LO!L!)
• As of this writing, there have been 566 comments, averaging 5.7 comments per post.
• 12,859 – the amount of spam comments blocked.
• 4 – the number of games released (not counting Defective, Trophiends, and the current work-in-progress untitled platformer, obviously).
• 105,947 – the number of views.
• 100 – the average number of views per day.

Pretty cool stuff, right?  Right.

Enough nonsense…

Alright, anyway, as for what I’ve been doing the past week or two.  Well, college started back up the other week.  As a result, I’ve really just been getting myself situated with my new schedule.  Any free time has been devoted to not doing anything related to game work.  It sucks, and I’ll be snapping out of it as time goes by.

However, that doesn’t mean I’m not doing anything.  In some rare occasions, I open up FlashDevelop and continue work on the basic core of the game – collision detection.

For this platformer, I will be mainly utilizing the separating axis theorem, something I’ve always wanted to implement myself for quite a while now.

Well, as of tonight (it’s night right now) I can happily say I have it pretty much nailed down, check it out here.

Through some sprites over them polygons and you got yourself an award-winning game right there.

Well, not exactly, but still.

Anyway, I just want to give a shout out to some great articles and explanations on the web that really helped me get this SAT thing nailed down.

1. 2D Polygon Collision
2. Separation of Axis Theorem for Collision Detection
3. Collision Detection and Response

Definitely wouldn’t have been able to make it this far without those three pages.  Great stuff.

Anyway, that’s it for now.  It’s 11PM – Battlefield 3 time.

Defective

It’ll be released eventually, I’ve started the process of getting it more attention and I’m thinking it will be sold sometime this month.  On Monday or Tuesday I’m going to be sending out emails to potential sponsors about Trophiends, so I’ll slip a little note about Defective in there too.  If you’re a sponsor and have a sponsor account on FlashGameLicense, go check it out here.

Trophiends

In case you haven’t heard, Trophiends went up for sale on FlashGameLicense this week.  I’m really happy to see it got an editor’s rating of 8, which from my understanding is really great (7 or 7.5 is the norm).  What does this mean?  Well, nothing really.  I’m sure it helps peak sponsor’s interest a little, but that’s probably about it.

Anyway, not only did it go up for sale, it already has it’s first bid.  I’m confident this game will go fast and will be my most successful yet.

Check out this lame trailer I put together for it in Windows Live Movie Maker.

Miscellaneous Things…

1. My old game, Christmas Defense, raked in $68 in ad revenue over the Christmas season, not bad for a year-old game.  You’d be surprised that that game appears to make roughly $15 – $20 a month year-round from the CPMStar ads alone.  Pretty good for a Christmas game, huh?
2. I know I said back in this post that I wanted to give ForTheLoss.org a redesign over my winter break from college.  Well, since I go back on Wednesday, I doubt this is going to happen.  There are two reasons why I want this redesign to happen – to present all of my completed games easier, for one, and secondly to just freshen up the logo (if you can call it that).  I used a new design for the “ForTheLoss Games” splash screen in Trophiends and I was hoping to update the site to go along with this new design.  The main reason I’m not going through with the redesign?  Well, I feel like that’s just me giving myself an excuse to procrastinate and not work on my game projects, which are far more important.

New Project

So what’s my new project since Trophiends is finished?

Well, no big details yet, but I can tell you it’s a platformer, it’s going to have a story, I’d like for it to implement the Starling API, and it’s certainly going to be my most ambitious project to date.  More information at a later date.

While transitioning from Trophiends to this new project, I’ve spent the majority of my time writing up a design document – jotting down any possible idea as soon as it enters my mind, cleaning up / optimizing my base classes I use for all of my games, and most importantly – drawing concept art.

As you can see from the picture on the right, I already have the design of the two protagonists and the main antagonist completed.  Now, of course these drawings are way over-detailed to be used in the game, but I wanted to try something new this time and draw up the characters in detail before designing their in-game sprites.

It took a while, but I think I eventually got the hand of sketching out rough drafts, line-tooling them up / coloring them in Flash, and finally adding the details / shadows in Photoshop.  In the end, I’m very happy with the outcome.

Alright, that’s enough from me.  Time to go enjoy some BF3 and get back to work.

So that’s it, Trophiends should be up for sponsorship within a day or two, whenever it gets the green light from the review crew at FlashGameLicense.com.  More news on that, Defective, and my upcoming game in a future post!

Game Updates

Trophiends has gotten some promising reviews / stats from the few “First Impression” players over at FlashGameLicense.com, so I’m really happy about that.  I’ve learned of a few areas of the game that can be improved, so I plan on doing some work on that tonight and possibly 100% completing the game.  (All that’s left to do besides those minor tweaks is to build 5 bonus levels, of which I already have a few ideas.)

If I don’t finish up tonight however, it’s not a big deal, I’ll finish it up tomorrow.  I’ll still be on schedule because I don’t plan on uploading the game for sponsorship until Wednesday morning Sunday morning.  I’ll also begin promoting Defective and focusing on getting that sold on Wednesday Sunday / Monday as well, so expect two games of mine to be released nearly simultaneously, probably in February.

The Holidays…

So Christmas came and went.  It was a fun weekend with the family, and the gifts weren’t too shabby either.  If any of you follow me on Twitter, you’ll probably be aware that I’ve been planning on building a computer for Christmas.  I spent the Christmas shopping season scouting on deals on all of the parts, and after receiving the monitor as a Christmas gift from my parents, I put the thing together on December 26th.

I ran into a few minor issues along the way, all of which only slowed me down. The first being that I plugged the monitor DVI cable into the wrong slot onto the PC when I first booted it up to see if it worked.  As a result, the computer turned on and looked to be working, but the monitor showed “No Signal.”  That was quickly resolved, however.

I then learned that I would need to buy a new copy of Windows 7, as I apparently can’t resuse the one I bought with a student discount back in 2009.

After installing Windows, I then realized I completely forgot about a wireless card.  Another two days of waiting while it shipped and the build was finally completed.  (Well, not completely.  I want to overclock the CPU but because a rear fan isn’t working I have to wait on that to arrive on Monday.)

Here are a few pictures of my battlestation.

And for those interested, here is the part list.

So yeah, as you can tell, I’m pretty excited.  I tried out Battlefield 3 and it runs super smooth at 1920 x 1080 at all High settings.  Even Ultra runs completely smooth (and looks amazing) except when there are a lot of explosions or something similar.

So that’s that.  I plan on getting to work on my next game project sometime this week.  I’ve been planning it for weeks now and can’t wait to see it take shape.  More news on that in the future, of course.

Alright, happy 2012!

So let me just get the apology out of the way for the absence of updates, I was finishing up the college semester and generally spending any free time I had not doing online / game work.  That’s all behind me now and I’m now focusing on getting Trophiends out the door.

Some Screenshots

“Trophiends” Progress

This list is going to seem abnormally large because there’s a backlog of the updates I keep written down since I haven’t posted recently.  That’s okay though, right?  Right.

• Added TNT crates.
• TNT crates and Trophies act appropriately on Moving Platforms / Treadmills.
• Drop Floors light up when stepped on.
• Perimeter Spikes optimized for performance and glitches fixed.
• Level Editor detects corrupt strings before loading a level, tells the user.
• Q and ESC hotkeys to quit.
• Level Editor “Test Level” button functionality implemented.
• Added Playtomic API for level sharing.
• Hotkeys to skip the end-of-level transition.
• Powerups show what they do after activated.
• Shared Object implemented to save player progress client-side.
• Created all 30 levels.
• Added all sounds.
• Added music.
• “Secret Reward” for completing the game added.
• Player-Made Levels menu added, game will load data from Playtomic servers.
• Preloader added.
• Splash screens added.
• Many various tweaks / changes / fixes.
• Fixed bug where Level Editor incorrectly determines a string is corrupt.
• Fixed bug with Floor Buttons / the things they control.
• Fixed bug where level loses focus on restart.
• Fixed bug where walking off a Horizontal Moving Platform would get the player stuck.
• Fixed bug where the player can die from barely touching a Spike when on a Moving Platform.
• Fixed bug where player doesn’t die if initially spawned on Spikes or if invincibility wears off while standing on Spikes.
• Fixed the bug where framerate would drop to ~20 and slow down the game temporarily when levels were started / restarted. Massively increased performance like a boss.

“Trophiends” To-Do List

• Finish up the “Rate this Level” menu when playing a custom player-made level.
• Get player-death heatmaps working (waiting on word of a potential bug regarding Playtomic).
• Add stat-tracking code (both Playtomic and GameTracker).
• Upload to FlashGameLicense for First Impression reviews (Monday).
• Add 5 or so bonus levels (probably will be done after initial feedback from First Impression players).
• Playtest and bug fix.
• Upload for sponsorship (around Januaray 4th, after the holidays).

Oh my goodness gracious, that was a lot of typing.

So that’s that, Trophiends will be ready for sponsorship by Christmas, but I won’t be uploading it until January because of Christmas / New Years, etc…

What About Defective?

Defective is still up for sponsorship.  I haven’t received a bid I feel comfortable with, and I haven’t invested much time on getting the word out about it.  Again, I’m waiting until after the holidays when sponsors are settled back in from their vacations.  Expect more news on this soon.

Future Plans

Like I mentioned at the top of this post, the college semester is behind me and I have a good month to work on my own stuff without interruption.  What am I planning for this month?

1. Finish Trophiends, get it up for sponsorship.
2. Get Defective sponsored and released.
3. Build my gaming PC and waste countless hours drooling over it / playing BF3.
4. Redesign ForTheLoss.org, new theme and everything.
5. Begin work on my next game.  Already sketching plans out for it.

Alright, I’m hungry and require nourishment.  I’ve spent far too much time on this post.

I’ll leave you with a picture of my festivus-inspired work area.

Merry almost-Christmas!

In the meantime, I’m trying to fit in as much work as possible into finishing Trophiends and getting it ready for sponsorship by January 1st.  As of right now, the game is actually, well, a game.  There are only five levels, but because of the built-in level editor, making levels is a breeze.  Making interesting and fun levels is the challenging part.

I spent most of yesterday finishing the “Level Cleared” menu as well as fixing a bunch of random bugs I encountered while testing out the new levels.  Today I plan on adding more levels, and unless I find bugs that take up my time to fix, I don’t see why I won’t be able to create all 30 of the game levels.  After that, I might work on creating the 9 bonus levels (insanely-difficult ones).

The level editor is 100% functional and working.  It even sends the level data to Playtomic when the user shares the level so others can play it.  After I’m done creating the actual built-in game levels, the last major thing to do outside of sound effects / music is to create a simple interface for users to browse through the custom user-made levels and play them.

So yeah, everything is moving along.  I’ve barely been online for the past week or two because of an onslaught of college work.  Even though there’s a lull in the action now, I expect things to pick up again for the end of the semester.  However, since there’s not much more to do with Trophiends, I’m confident I’ll have it at least 90 – 95% complete by Christmas.

Alright, that’s all from me.  Speaking of Christmas, I put the banner for Christmas Defense back up in the header.  I can’t believe it’s already the Christmas season again.

Nobody even cared.

Oh man, the lols that were had.

Wondering why I split this intro into five lines?

So the image above would fit in well and look nice.  Yeah…  Anyway, let’s begin.

General stuff:

Alright, well, first off, why the delay?  To be honest, I wasn’t feeling too productive three weeks ago.  As a result, I purposely skipped writing a post the Sunday two weeks ago since there was no development to report on.  Last week, however, this damn freak snow storm (in October, mind you) knocked the fecal matter out of my area and power was out for six days. No internet equals no Weekly Game Update post.

I did, however, spend the past seven days getting lot’s of work done, and even though a good majority of that work was “behind the scenes” (bug fixes, minor tweaks, etc), I feel the game has really come a long way from where it was the last Weekly Game Update post I made.  Don’t believe me?  Check out this bitchin’ “accomplished” list:

Accomplished last week:

• Added a hotkey for the eraser in the level editor.
• Updated the logo and menu buttons.
• Added more functionality to the level editor’s menu.
• Added a credits menu.
• When loading, a level dynamically changes certain tiles’ appearance depending on the positioning.
• Menus now support keyboard input.
• Cleaned up and optimized the GameSound class.
• Level goes to the main menu upon winning (temporary).
• Spikes have finally been tweaked and are no longer glitchy. They are also much more realistic / forgiving.
• Shooting spike blocks come in two varieties – slow and fast shooting speed.
• Added a new danger, “Electric Poles.”
• Moving platforms detect their bounds on initialization and ease in / out of these bounds.
• Added a new danger, the “Perimeter Spike” that creeps along the perimeter of walls. Kills player on contact.
• Added functionality for the Perimeter Spike to latch onto moving platforms.
• Added some time before the level restarts after all the players have been killed.
• Trophies detect floors now and can fall through the air.
• Fixed bug where player would “jump” at the top of a vertical-moving platform’s movement.
• Fixed a bug where player would “slide” while standing on a moving platform.
• Tweaked some graphics.
• Added functionality for the “Down” key, user’s can press it to have the player drop down off of a moving platform.
• Fixed a bug where players would occasionally not detect an upward-moving vertical platform and would fall through them.
• Fixed a bug where horizontal-moving platforms would “snatch” players off of vertical-moving platforms if the two shared the same space.
• Fixed a bug where user’s would find it difficult to have the player move left / right into a small 32×32 hole in the wall while jumping.
• General code cleaning / organizing and bug fixes / tweaks.

To-do this week:

• Have the level editor determine if an encoded level string is corrupted when it takes input from the user.
• Add TNT Crates as a new danger.
• Tweak HUD to display the number of living / killed players differently.
• Try to optimize the collision detection / moving platform detection as much as possible.
• Other miscellaneous bug fixes.

So damn, that’s it.  That was a lot of typing there, jeez.

I’m hoping that by this time next week I’ll be ready to finally focus on making levels for the game.  Currency will be so cash.

Screenshots next week (probably). Nothing too new to show just yet, like I said, a lot of “behind-the-scenes” work this past week.

Defective

One final thing before I finally end this friggen post.

I put Defective up for bidding about one or two weeks ago.  If you’re a sponsor signed up with FlashGameLicense.com, go and check it out here.

Alright, I had enough.

Alright, let’s get into it. Firstly, some news on Defective.

“Defective” stuff:

On Friday, I received the final two music tracks for Defective, with the grand total being five tracks – a main-theme track, three level  tracks, and one boss track.  They all sound great, and I can’t wait to finally finish this game.

I could finish it today and upload it to FlashGameLicense.com on Monday, but I’m doing to hold out one more week.  This is mainly because it’s currently the middle of the month, which in my opinion is not the best time to put up a new game for bidding.  Why?  Well, mainly because I believe it’s best to upload near the beginning of a new month, since sponsors have a fresh monthly budget to work with.

As a result, I’m going to work on Defective next weekend, finish it up and add the music, and upload it on Tuesday, October 25th.  That way, by the time November 1st rolls around, the game should have at least one or two bids on it already, whether or not those will be the initial “garbage” bids or not doesn’t really matter, as long as there’s activity, other sponsors will be attracted.

Again, this is all my opinion.  Uploading at the beginning / middle / end of the month or on a Saturday / Sunday may really not matter, I don’t really know.  However, I’ll just stick with my current plan.

Okay?  Okay.

By the way, in case you never saw it, here’s the trailer for Defective uploaded back in August.

Alright, let’s talk about Trophiends:

This week was a very productive week.  Not only did I finally get a name for the game, but I practically started and finished the built-in level editor.  I totally didn’t expect it to be so easy (it’s not done yet, but it’s very close).  This upcoming week I intend to spend on finishing the level editor, updating and adding more menu’s, and generally tweaking the actual gameplay.  Honestly, if all goes well, I should be actually looking to build levels for the game by this time next week.

Screenshots:

Have a look at what the level editor looks like.

Accomplished this week:

• Floor buttons activate moving platforms.
• Designed and implemented the main menu.
• Designed the initial logo, will probably go through another revision however.
• Practically built the entire level editor.
• Bug fixes and tweaks.

To do:

• Tweak the gameplay (Trophy objects should respond to gravity, spikes need to be more forgivable).
• Add more tiles, mainly for decorative purposes only.
• Finish the level editor.
• Add to / modify the main menu.

Alright, that’s all for now.  I’m gonna go get some more work done, so get out.

General stuff:

I still haven’t come with with a good title.  I don’t know, it’ll probably just come to me one day (kind of like how I got the title for Don’t Panic).  Hopefully that’ll happen soon, I’m tired of this “Puzzle Platformer” nonsense.

Anyway, it was a productive week of work.  The main challenge that I finally overcame was adding moving platforms and ironing out any bugs / glitches that arose from them or the other level elements (“jump-pads”, treadmills, etc…)  As of right now everything is bug free and works perfectly.

Accomplished:

• Moving platforms added and debugged.
• Ironed out the performance of other level elements like “jump-pads” and treadmills.
• Buttons & doors added.
• Spike-launchers added.
• More particle additions & fixes (both for bugs and performance).
• Many a bugs fixed and other small tweaks.

To do:

• Add more things for buttons to control.
• Make spikes more forgivable somehow (as of now, they kill players much too easily).
• Add randomized elements to levels just for decoration purposes.
• Work on and implement first menus.

So that’s it.  Sorry for the short update this week (as well as lack of screenshots, nothing new-enough to show yet).  Next week will be better.

(Or not, I may have just out right lied to you.)