So that was one hell of a journey.  Granted, with Weapons on Wheels being the first real game I’ve ever developed, I probably did alot of things the long and hard (twss) way.

Play it on MaxGames.com, who is the awesome sponsor.

Update: Also play it on NewGrounds and vote 5 to be awesome.

Update 2: Play it on Kongregate and 5-star it to be even awesomer.

So that’s it.  Go try it out and tell me how disappointed you are in the comments!

In all seriousness, though, I learned alot when developing that game.  Both in terms of code-stuff and in terms of what makes a game fun.  I’ll be using all that knowledge as I develop Hero Dude, which will hopefully only take me a fraction of the time it took me to make Weapons on Wheels.

Protip – don’t go directly behind the blue car.

So I figured I would make a post about this, since I thought it was pretty interesting.  Here is an image showing the sprite development I went through trying to find a nice design for the player/boss sprites for Hero Dude.

The first two versions of the main character differ pretty greatly.  At first I was thinking I’d just toss the main character into this Mega Man-style suit of armor lookin’ thing.  Since I was going for a humorous take on the game, I figured it didn’t matter how silly he looked or how many times I stamped his “HD” (Hero Dude) logo on him.

The second and third versions of the main character have more of a resemblance between them.  It looks like I started getting the mindset that he was going to be some sort of a soldier or something.  This becomes more apparent in the third version.

The boss didn’t undergo much of a change.  I always knew he was going to be a cliche mad scientist trying to destroy the world or something (lol spoilers).  He kept his white labcoat and gray hair through both versions, I only made him fatter and got rid of his huge hair stacks.  (This was done to preserve the shape of his head/body, which I want to be uniform throughout the game.)

And yeah, that’s about it.  Today I’ll be getting back to work on Hero Dude.  Mainly working on some gun action today.  I want to start drawing ideas for levels and whatnot.  I already know that 95% of the game takes place on the Boss’s flying ship-fort thing.  The other 5% is the player getting to the flying ship-fort thing.

(Trust me, this all makes sense in my head.)

So I’m going to keep this post short, mostly because I’m tired and just want to relax go watch some TV.

ForTheLoss.org has a new design.  If you’re not seeing it, that must mean you’re a regular visitor, holy crap, thanks!  It also means you have to clear your cache.

It was a spur of the moment decision.  I wanted to give this site a definite “look” and develop some sort of brandable logo for it that I can put into my games.

• On Friday night I decided I would develop one more WordPress theme – one for this site.
• On Saturday I designed the whole layout in Photoshop.
• On Sunday I coded it.
• On Monday I WordPressified and launched it.

Fascinating, I know.

Also, I know this isn’t one of my best themes.  I really don’t care so Paul you can go suck a long one.

I wanted to give off a retro arcade pixel-y sort of look and I think I stayed kinda stayed true to that theme.  Again, whatever.  It’s not like this is a web design blog, am I right?  HA HA.

Quick Game Stuff

Well that’s it.  This is all I’ve doing for the past few days.  Tomorrow I’ll resume work on Hero Dude.

Also, regarding Weapons on Wheels, I accepted a bid on FlashGameLicense.com last night.  Once the sponsor and I exchange some words, I’ll finally be able to release that game.  Gonna be so cash.

PS – If you see any bugs in the theme, tell me.  I didn’t even bother testing it in other browsers or Operating Systems.  It’s not like I was going to release this theme for the public, so yeah.

Yep, you read correctly – “Hero Dude.”

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….

So while I wait for a winning bid on FlashGameLicense.com for a sponsor for Weapons on Wheels, I’ve begun work on a new game project.

I’ve been switching back and forth from working on the graphics (player/enemy art, animations) and some of the main engine of the game.  It’s going to be a very retro-sort of platformer.  Not necessarily retro in the graphics-sense, but rather in the gameplay-sense.

I want it to be a very short and fun game, not lasting more than 15 or so minutes.  (Is that long in Flash-game time?)  Also, I’m really going to focus on making the graphics pop with colorful and unique-looking characters.

The gameplay itself will be very fun and fast-paced with some hints of  “Castle Crashers”-sort of humor.

So yeah, I have more to say but I think this is already quite a boring post.  Kudos to those of you that actually read all of it and cared.

In other news, go play Exit Path multiplayer, one of the funnest Flash games I’ve played in a while.

Sorta slipped my mind there, I suppose.

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…

I thought this time would never come.  I’ve finally completed my first game.  (Well… Unless you count those one or two games I made in GameMaker 4 years ago…)

Anyway, yeah, it’s done.  I’d give some more info, but there’s really nothing to say.  Plus I just want to go relax after all that coding nonsense.

The quest to find a sponsor begins tonight.  If all goes well I could be releasing the game this week!

Wow, never thought I’d say that…

I have not abandoned all of you.  Still working on getting this game out the door every day.  It just seems like every day I run into a new issue that I never expected/makes no sense.  For example, did you know that putting a simple preloader on an AS3 game is an absolute dick-fucking hell?

Yeah.

It is.

So, for whatever reason, Flash is cooperating fully once again.  I just have a few loose ends to tie up, and the game should be ready.  Once I have a bug-tested SWF that is 100% working, I’ll start looking for a sponsor (Hopefully tonight the search will begin.)

Also Splinter Cell Conviction rocks.

PS- Credits in Flash games – do people do that? I guess I could go find out for myself, but I don’t wanna.

Every time I try to export a swf, Flash decides to pull a LOL and after compiling the SWF for the usual 20 or so seconds, I get this lovely message:

I *think* the reason behind this is because the .FLA file is getting too big.  I’ve just finished importing all of the levels (PNG’s, made in Photoshop) and now the filesize is 315MB.  (The most recent working swf I have is only 13MB, so, relax.)

I think that because this started happening right after I started importing all of the huge image files into Flash.  I tried to verify this by deleting a bunch of them and then trying to export, but it still didn’t work.

I dunno. Really running out of ideas here.

Inb4 “did you reinstall Flash, Ralph?”  From what I’ve read online, that’s never the answer.  In fact, from what I’ve read online, no one knows the goddamn answer.

FFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-

More updates as updates occur.