… Because… well things are just quiet. No major break through and no major events. I’ve been spending the gorgeous days with my family. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before that the game development is a dream. I am chasing the dream, but I will not allow it to interfere with my life either.
This week has been a difficult week for my family as we have lost a loved one. I have not done much by way of development as I’m sure you can all understand. I gave a post this week and I seriously can’t even remember what it was about! I don’t want to leave my readers in the dark so I will share that I am making changes to my development model due to recently discovered news. (Oh yeah that’s what I wrote about!)
I’ve met a few interesting people on my Google + who have provided me with resources I normally wouldn’t discover on my own. The information from these resources have me rethinking my business model of using Flash to develop free games with ad support. Adobe has made some announcements that will be changing with Flash that I don’t exactly agree with. Particularly the one that will take 9% of my profits if I generate over $50k a year. While this most likely will not happen any time soon (if at all) for my games it is still a reason to consider other methods.
I’m doing this little snippet blog from inside of the WordPress Metro App in Windows 8 Consumer Preview. The app has a long way to go, but if they move like they did with the Android app it will get there fast.
This week has gone by without me even noticing it. I’ve spent most of this time walking in a half asleep haze drifting from home to work and back. I have put some work into the artistic approach of the tiles on Puzzled and started to sketch out the menu screen, controls screen, and win/lose screen. I will be spending time looking a the Mochi Media Achievements API as well to try and begin integrating those in. The high score doesn’t work as well with my current scoring method so I’m going to come up with something that will be more appropriate.
This last week has been mostly uneventful. I have been going through a root canal and the following crown of a bicuspid. Easter was a wonderful time with my wife and the kids. I didn’t work on code much this week, but I did tinker with music some more. My biggest problem is I’m looking at too large a scale of music for games! I don’t need symphonies and I need to realize this.
I’ve also found a home on a Minecraft server which consumed some time while I got settled in and produced my first build, mine, and public offering there. I started sketching out ideas for another game, but I fully intend on releasing the final 1.0.0 of Puzzled first.
The holiday made the past week a very personal time with less work. I hope everyone had a great one and I’ll see about getting more done on Puzzled this week.
Hey everyone! It’s Wednesday again and this is my promised weekly post. As it turns out this whole weekly post thing is keeping me focused, for the most part. I have been working on some music for Puzzled this past week and realized that I’m not sure what/how to do this. I’ve gone into FL Studio 10 and tinkered a little, but all my songs so far aren’t very suitable or interesting. I want the music to be happy and relaxing. I also want it to be just enough to be a slight distraction [evil grin]. I will be adding code inside of the animation (yeah yeah I know… Not in a class?) that will play the two sounds at a slightly lower volume through a channel. My hopes are that this will take the rough edge off of the effects since I didn’t use a complex program (nor do I have one) to record and edit the effects themselves.
I’m new to sound in game development, however, due to a lack of people who are reliable I’m forced to be a full out one man team here. The sound effects are both made by yours truly! Using a cheap Logitech headset microphone and the free audio editing software Audacity I was able to adjust these simple sound effects to become satisfactory. I think these small changes to the player piece have given him some life! He’s not just a token hopping around a grid. He’s a goop… he moves fluidly… he plops and splats happily around the… well the crappy artwork grid. I’m still working on the tile artwork and methods to display the numbers.
After some rather forceful convincing, Puzzled has a slight face lift. I gave a little love to the player’s character in the game. I give to you, Oop the Goop! Oop has absolutely no back story yet. I haven’t really thought much of a “plot” for a puzzle game, but I wanted to give it some personality. I am hoping to introduce some sound effects to Oop’s adventures around the board next.
I have successfully moved Puzzled from Flash Develop to Flash. This move went much smoother than I had been expecting it to, but due to interruptions I haven’t been able to dabble much into creating the menu or other features. It seems as though my pure AS3 version isn’t going to play as nicely as I thought it might, but I will not know until I am able to actually work on it more.
