I don't think I have ever been more excited about a game. Even if it sucks it will be awesome ().

That offworld post has some great stuff in it. GameTrailers has plenty more for people who want to get hyped up about this.

Yeah as long as the game is free I don't think you have to worry. One of the most successful flash games recently was a 2D Portal game.

Awesome artwork. Looks very professional.

Here you go. Might be worth uploading the images to your server. Not entirely sure about the current host...

This is awesome!

I just dropped this in an empty FlashDevelop project, and it worked straight away _{(FD users: Compile Mode.as, not Preloader.as, as you would normally)}. I'd love to start coding with this right now but Uni work calls! After looking over it quickly it looks very nice - can't wait to get something running in it.

Thanks

Remember when the Wii was announced and everybody thought that now 1:1 swordfighting was possible? This is the same for martial arts, only ten times worse.

Microsoft is clearly trying to get in on the casual goodness money that the Wii is raking in. Everyone thought the Wii was just a gimmick and had very limited potential, but it's pretty much printing money for Nintendo. And now with the MotionPlus 1:1 swordfighting *is* possible...

Not to say I'm not skeptical about this. I'm under the impression that 3/4 of that Milo video isn't actually possible right now, but maybe it will be and maybe there will still be good games that take advantage of what it can do.

The best example of this in my mind is the Pocket God game for iPhone. Every week they release some new content for it. They've done 17 episodes so far. It was one of the best selling iPhone games for a while, but it looks like it's losing its thunder a bit now.

Personally, I really like the business model but I think if I were to do it I would do it more like Valve does TF2 patches rather than Pocket Gods approach. More content to begin with. No clue if it would make more money though...

Man this game is fun. I stayed up far, far later than i intended. I think the best bit is how it started as a building game, where we tryed to make cool bases, and ended up being us all exploring the lava-filled caverns below. Good times

Aw man that is awesome.

I would go to great extremes to make a game with you (/your art)

I've been browsing your blog and I'm wondering, how many of your game concepts have become playable?

I kinda dislike the attitude this forum has towards manbabies posting cool things. I don't want to cause offence here, but surely if you don't like something you can just not read it. There are definitely instances where people are selling HOTDOGS, but this looks like it could be a useful tool that would benefit the TIGS community...

[This]

This is how you look for people to work on your project. None of that jForce business. Unfortunately I can't help out on the art, but if you this was a paid position you would get more interest.

Is this going to be in flash? It looks like a great game, post a link when it's finished!

I was curious as to why ad-hoc distribution was mac only, so I did a bit of snooping and it looks like you can do it on windows too. Theres just a little bit of fiddling required.
http://www.markj.net/iphone-ad-hoc-distribution-windows-mac/

I've emailed you through BetaHelper. It might be handy to make getting people's unique ID's a bit easier.

I'll happily help out. I don't need to be signed up the paid iPhone developer program to load it on my phone though do I?

Long time no post.

1. I find its a good habit to put things like that in to functions so that if I change something related, I only have to change the one function rather than sorting through my code to see what I have to change. If you know you won't change the code later on you can avoid the use of the function but in creating complex projects is usually not a bad idea to abstract it like that. Could be I was just coding crappily though

Hideous has convinced me to make the next tute (sorry anyone who was expecting this earlier!) so i'll be posting a bit in a couple of days. If you have anything you'd like covered or any ideas feel please post!

I just finished first year Mechatronic Engineering + Computer Science. 'Twas a good year

Do you go to the Kensington Campus? (If so: Awesome! There are many computer science related events that you may be interested in as a game programmer)

Calling HECS (or HELP as it's now called since the marketting police got at it) an "interest-free loan" is a bit of a misnomer/out-right lie.

a) HECS/HELP is indexed to CPI, so it will increase over time. Last year I had 'indexation' of 2.8% applied to my HECS debt.

b) The Interest is built into the loan. There are massive discounts for paying the debt off early.

*edit c) Not to forget that the payments are compulsorily extracted from your salary

Ah ok. I wasn't entirely sure about HECS/HELP so when I posted that I figured if I wasn't right, someone would correct me. So cheers. (c) kinda sucks. What about if you're self employed?

I guess I should've researched that a little, but hey - no uni till next year so i'll leave it till later

Is anyone studying at UNSW?

Speaking of nursing homes, the indiegamer forums have a "more mature" crowd.

@deadeye: That's gotta suck. I live in Australia so im lucky that the government pays a large portion of my University fees. Also, life-time interest free loan on the stuff I do have to pay. Not a bad deal.

[never]

I'm annoyed at the misconceptions about Flash displayed everywhere.

For an interpretted language, AS3 is reasonably fast. While it would never be anywhere near as fast as raw C + SDL/OpenGL, the development time is generally massively lower.

Just to clear some things up:
- Every display object has an alpha property. You can set it to any value in between 0 and 1. The CPU usage of this would be the equivalent of moving it 1 pixel (roughly) so it definitely isn't particularly slow. (...Or what Gnarf said)
- Flash has a variety of blending modes. See here.
- Flash player 10 does support hardware acceleration. I'm not certain how much faster this mode would be, but from the sound of it, it isn't amazing.

While Flash/AS3 isn't perfect my opinion is that it's a very nice platform for quickly and easily producing nice looking games that take minimal time to get running on a player's computer.

[Do I need anything other than Flash?]

Do I need anything other than Flash?

You already have everything you need to get started. I personally prefer working with FlashDevelop because it's nicer to code in, but it definitely is not necessary. You can use FlashDevelop together with the Flash IDE so it's worth giving it a look. If you're after libraries, there aren't any specific 'must-have's but there are plenty of very useful libs. Take a look here (They're mostly for AS3).

Which Actionscript should I use?

If you're already familiar with Java, AS3 will be a much easier transition than AS2 simply because the syntax is quite similar. AS2 may be easier to get up and running quickly, but its worth learning AS3 for all the benefits it provides. It is far far faster than AS2, it supports object oriented programming (like Java) and has a wider range of libraries.

How well does Flash work with bigger projects?

Have a look at what the ffilmation engine is capable of. This demo is a great-looking, large and complex flash game that loads it's assets externally.

Is it worth it to learn Actionscript?

The major benefits of Flash over GameMaker would be the ease of distribution, and the potential to enter the commercial flash game market. Otherwise what both can achieve would be reasonably similar. I think it is safe to say that you wouldn't be limited by creating games in Flash.

I wouldn't consider AS3 a 'transition' language from GML to Java because all three really are very different. The most important part of Flash is how it handles the rendering and this differs greatly from how GameMaker and Java handle it. Otherwise, AS3 isn't a bad way to be introduced to object oriented languages.

In case you're interested, I wrote a basic tutorial for AS3 using FlashDevelop here.

Best of luck! Feel free to ask any more Flash related questions 'round here. There seems to be quite a few flash coders now.

What could probably work is checking each frame if the mouse button is being held down.

Unfortunately, you can't check that statically; you need to have a MouseEvent instance to check if the button is down, and MouseEvents are only spawned when the cursor is inside the frame, from what I can tell.  There doesn't seem to be a static method for checking mouse status.

I'm pretty sure you can add a listener to the stage for MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT so that you can stop following the mouse when it leaves the screen. Haven't tried it recently, but I remember it working.

I love what you've got so far, but i get the impression it would work better if the tentacle followed the cursor while it was inside the screen, and you dragged balloons by clicking.

Edit: The clock tower looks like it needs to be a little more grand. Otherwise, the ambience is so absorbing.

http://www.doublefine.com/news.php/site/just_one_more_grim_thing/

I haven't had a chance to look through it yet, but I will definitely read it when I have the time.

Post anything interesting you see