Here’s the first weekly game update on my current game Kill the Bad Things, which will be my first ever mobile game.

This week, things went very smoothly, though due to other things getting in the way (college), it seems that weekdays are incredibly unproductive for me.  The majority of the work that got done this week was done yesterday (Saturday) and I’m confident that another burst of updates will be done today (most of which you probably won’t hear about until next week’s “Weekly Game Update” post).

Alright enough nonsense, here’s a screenshot of how the game looks so far.

I’m extremely happy with how the game looks when it’s being played on an actual device (the enlarged screenshot doesn’t do it justice).  The colors are much more vivid and the graphics are very sharp and detailed.  Oh, and if you happen to recognize the design of the player in that screenshot (which I’m sure 100% of you don’t) I actually re-made one of the characters from an old scrapped project of mine, seen here.

Accomplished:

• Set up basic foundation of the game / levels – optimized blitting to simulate scrolling and free up memory only to find that it actually slowed the game down and had no effect on memory, scrapped it.
• Programmed a functional directional-pad set up on the screen.
• Player moves around the screen with the directional-pad.
• Designed temporary HUD elements, eventually got around to designing a better looking HUD (what is seen in the screenshot is very similar to what the final product will look like).
• Developed a bitmap-font system to display text on the screen using a font sprite-sheet and blitting.
• Programmed the timer in the HUD.
• Designed temporary background tiles (grass).
• Designed the main character in one of his standing positions.

To-do:

• Animate the player in his standing / running sprites for all four directions (technically three, as right / left will be mirrored) – also possibly the melee attack animation for all four (three) directions.
• Develop the Player (and generally the Character) classes more – adjustable acceleration, speed, sprites, etc…
• Develop the HUD further with the remaining three buttons functional (or at least press-able) – “Pause / Weapons,” “Melee Attack,” and “Weapon Attack.”
• Splash / loading screens – how do they work?

And that’s about it for everything about that game.

Now, about Defective.  On Monday I will activate Quick Auction on FlashGameLicense, which from my understanding is a quick auction (no way).  If I don’t get any bids I feel happy about, I will be self-sponsoring the game and releasing it some time next week (the week beginning March 4th).  Expect news on that next weekend.

So have I been working up a storm today.  Not only did I finally get my head wrapped around the whole process of downloading all of the SDK’s and installing / connecting my phone to my computer and generally setting up my Android development environment, I also made loads of progress laying the foundation for what will be my first Android app.  Here’s a sneak peak of what it looks like now (all placeholder graphics, obviously):

For my eagle-eyed readers, you may have noticed the title of the game.  Kill the Bad Things not only made me chuckle the first time I thought of it, it also describes the game perfectly.

Release Date?

Since this isn’t an online Flash game, I won’t have to go through the sponsorship process, so the time from completion to launch will be nearly instant.  On top of that, this game won’t be anywhere near as big or complex as my previous games, so development time will be much shorter as well.

I originally came up with this idea to submit for my free Blackberry Playbook, but it seems I missed out because I didn’t sign up in time.  Regardless, I still estimate this will only take me roughly two weeks to complete.  (Place your bets, am I going to regret saying that or not?)

Alright, I’m going to get back to work now.

Wow, man.  Just wow.  This time last week I wasn’t even thinking of designing a new theme for this site.  One crazy week later, I have a pretty sweet new home for all of my creations.

Edit: For comparison, here’s a screenshot of the old version.

What’s New?

Nothing is terribly new, per say, I mean, I’m still running off of WordPress with the same old plugins.  However, I have added and tweaked a few things.

• Nested comments, finally.  I’ve always been deathly afraid of the WordPress comments.php file (still am) but I finally got around to (somewhat) conquering it.  I’m awaiting Paul to find an error within the CSS or whatever, though.
• I’ve generally cleaned up the layout and have a more presentable area for my current projects / completed games located at the top of the content area.  I also created a simple randomizer to give each of my games a chance in the spotlight.
• I’ve slightly cleaned up and tweaked the Animations and Flash Games pages.  I’ve also added a Portfolio page which I haven’t filled in yet (give me a break, okay?).  I’ll populate it with a list of my games, animations, websites, banners, etc I’ve created within the week or so.
• Cleaned up the sidebar area, added a Twitter widget!

And that’s about it in terms of new additions.  I’m eager to never have to look at CSS for another year or so when I feel like updating to version 4.0 or something.

Game News

Alright, so you remember I make Flash games, right?  I know, weird.

Anyway, I haven’t been able to work on my current project over the past week because of this whole site design thing, and I don’t intend to make a terrible amount of progress in the next week either.  Why, you ask?  I’ll tell you.

I finally own my first smartphone.  As of this past week, I am the proud owner of a new Samsung Galaxy Nexus S.  Why do you care?  Well, for one, I can now take pictures of my food  the squirrel on my walk to class the sun as it sets outside my window my cat and immediately upload it to Twitter while I’m out and about!

Oh, and I can also start developing Android apps.

I’ve been very eager to get into the mobile game market, but because of the facts that I’ve only ever owned an iPod Touch before and that I hate Apple with a passion (lol?), I never looked into it.

I already have an idea for a game that I originally thought up while looking into the free Blackberry Playbook offer and I intend to follow through with it over the course of the next two weeks.  It’s small enough to not be overwhelming but big enough to lend itself to helping me learn the ins and outs of mobile game development.

After that’s out of the way, I expect to try something new and give developing games for toddlers / kids a shot.  I have a few ideas floating around for that, so it seems promising.

What About Flash?

Well, I’ll still be using Flash to develop my apps, so it’s not like I’m ditching it or anything.  I intend on using Adobe Air to deploy my games onto the marketplace, at least until I get a good idea of it’s capabilities / limitations in comparison to native Android development.

And no, I’m not abandoning the online Flash game market either.  I just really want to focus on solely Android stuff in the immediate future.

So yeah, that’s that.  It should be a very interesting next couple of weeks, it seems.

In the meantime, I had enough.  I’m sure there are a few bugs and annoyances in the new design that I’ve overlooked, and I’m sure you’ll point them out (Paul) in the comments.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I haven’t played Battlefield 3 in an unhealthy amount of days…

This week I didn’t get too much done other than some relatively minor tweaks and optimizations to the collision detection.  On Saturday, I spent the majority of the day figuring out the best way to construct levels using a mix between the Flash IDE and Tiled Map Editor.  As a result, I began drawing some art for the game (which will be re-drawn for the actual game, everything here is just a placeholder to help me get an idea of what levels will look like).

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.

Well, not so much of an extravaganza as it is just a regular post, but you get the idea.

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.