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.
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.
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.
I wanted to jump out today and thank everyone who is following me. My statistics are very warming to see. The people who have chosen to follow me are one of the many factors that keeps me pressing forward. Followers are like little tidbits of inspiration, even when they are saying nothing at all!
As per my planning I spent this weekend for myself. I played games (World of Warcraft and Terraria) and I spent time with my children. My brain continued to scramble over the current state of Puzzled and I checked my MM Dashboard to see if I was getting any hits. I am happy to report that yes, people are playing my live beta.
Puzzled has official started to generate money. It’s a very… very small amount at this time, but that means people are interested enough to take a look. The release is only a Beta release and is lacking a lot of sustainable features, but I don’t know if using Live Update with Mochi Media will move me to a noticeable location each release.
I’m going to begin the move from Flash Develop to Flash CS5 on this now since I’ve found, what I feel is a limitation using a pure code environment with Flash. AS3 and Flash are built for one another. Without the Flash IDE I lose valuable things like Tweening libraries. These libraries would allow me to make fluid movements easily in my code. Alternatively I create my artwork for my classes so that you see nice looking tiles instead of boxes with numbers.
I feel I should be sharing the “why” for my return. Why now after so long! Well I have to give some of the credit to my friend who attempted to begin development a while back. The rest however must go to the developers at Flipline Studios and their series of Papa’s games. I grew particular fond of Papa’s Taco Mia and just kept thinking, “This is Flash? Hell I can do this!” I have the background to be capable of programming and the artistic talent to create a presentable set of visuals. Sound seems to be surprisingly easy to come up with (excluding music).
