I have recently started working again on my latest game, Frogget-It! Work is coming along great, and I assume it’ll be release in a month or two. I already have other projects in mind, but I doubt they will be in Flash…

Also, since my deperature of Imba Games in January, I’ve joined the new eBay development center in Tel-Aviv. While I am not developing games there, I am still having a blast. Frogget-It! will probably be my last Flash project (need to find a new domain name, damnit :D).

IndigonHTMLStudio?

IndigonJSStudio?

Bah.

I’m leaving Imba Games after a year and a half. I decided it’s time to move on from developing purely in AS3. I feel like my career has come to an halt. I also fear labeling myself as an “AS3/Flash developer” because of the unfortunate fact that a “Flash developer” is an underrated job, especially in Israel. It’s time to move on and find a different job, even if it’ll not be related to game development.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean I abandon game development and AS3 entirely! I still develop under Indigon! Remember Physics Defense? I killed it. I had an idea in mind, which didn’t work as a game. The important thing is that I have recently started working on a new small game called Frogget-it! It’s a game developed for Android, with possible ports to iOS and web Flash portals. I can’t say anything about it now besides “IT’S FUN!”.

 

 

While I do have respect for Adobe (Flash is where my money comes from after all) , and I am also in gratitude for a 2600$ worth prize (won a CS5 Master Collection in a lottery at the latests Global Game Jam event), they do know how to annoy me. I will begin with something I encountered yesterday:  AS3′s Math.atan2 function. A very common function, especially in game development. I had to use it in order to point graphical arrows to various locations. When I tested the result, all the angels were wrong. Obviously the first thing I did was checking if I inserted the right parameters. And I did.

The documentation in Flash Builder 4 shows the ‘x’ parameter before the ‘y’ one. Seeing the above tooltip, I automatically wrote the parameters as I was told to. I had used atan2 in the past, and in the cold depths of my head I knew that someone was wrong (used it countless of times in the past, before I started using FB4), but who would argue with formal documentation? After 30 minutes of trying to figure what the hell went wrong, I checked the AS3 API on the web, and saw the following:

Adobe = FAIL

The function’s parameters are actually in the opposite order (!). Needless to say that I reversed their order in my code and got the desired result.

—–

Unfortunately, the resolution for the second issue is not so simple as the above: It seems the classical MovieClip’s gotoAndStop() method isn’t 100% consistent when using frame labels as parameters (which I do quite often when working on Gladelings). gotoAndStop() receives 2 parameters:

1. An Object object which can be either a number (for a frame number) or a string (for a frame label name).
2. A scene name, in case your MovieClip has more than one scene and you want to switch between them. This parameter has a default value of null.

I know that sometimes using gotoAndStop() with frame labels names doesn’t change the currentFrame property of the MovieClip immediately, which causes all sort of problems (Adobe claims this is a feature, not a bug [...]). In order to fix this problem when it happens, I search for the desired frame label name in the MovieClip’s currentLabels, and then use gotoAndStop() with the found frame label number instead. Today, I noticed a new, very odd, behavior:

After returning from a gotoAndStop() call with a frame label name as parameter, the currentFrame doesn’t change. The thing that does change against all common logic is the currentScene property! Instead of jumping to the desired frame, Flash overrides the existing Scene object, and replaces it with what seems to be a cloned copy of the original scene (it has the same length and same labels, but you can see it’s an entirely new object in debug mode). As usual, I tried overriding the problem by calling gotoAndStop() with a frame number, but the same thing happened again – the scene was modified and the MovieClip stayed at frame 1.

I have absolutely no idea why this happens. I thought it’s a good idea to share this since I couldn’t find any reference to this behavior in the web. Maybe others encountered it and can elaborate.

—–

Next week I’ll return to update about my undergoing projects and spew some information about a future Star Relic 2.

Two weeks the game company I work at, released its first game, Gladelings. Gladelings is Facebook social game we have been working on for the last 9 months. I was mainly responsible for the AS3 programming of the various mini-games that the game includes, the sound work (originally I even did the dubbing!) and other programming tasks. We continue to work on the game for a big upcoming worldwide release in the upcoming weeks. Hopefully the game will succeed and I will be more relieved. Success means I get to work on my own projects with less pressure :P.

What'ca looking at?

Besides Gladelings, I have other big news. I finish my Computer Science degree at the end of January. This means two things:

1. SCREW YOU TEL-AVIV UNIVERSITY!
2. More time to develop my own games.

Since Star Relic, I have really never sat down to work seriously on a new project. There have been a few ideas and few start-ups here and then, but due to work, studies and personal issues, nothing materialized into a future game. Now this changes. There is Physics Defense. I started working on the game a few weeks ago (and even bought a domain – no idea how nobody bought it before), and if things go well, I hope to release it by the end of the year (just in time for the next Israeli Game Awards).

To end this post, I will mention that my university AI project, Fivel, now appears in the blog. The game was made by myself and with two friends and we received very good feedback for it. Originally, we made a different game called Petri but be cancelled it due to its simplicity.

I’m covered by work on my company’s game, university projects and my own new game. The game I’m working on at Imba Games will be released next month, I’ll post about it for sure. It’s my last semester in university (!) and one of the courses requires to build a game and implement some AI into it. As the only game developer in the course, I started working on a game even before the project was announced. I experimented with an small engine for board games which allows to change rules easily, and after a few hours of drawing I received the early version of…

PETRI

>squeak<

The game is made along with two fellow students. Now that the game is ready our main goal is to create impressive AI and develop the game furthermore. We wonder whether we should write the game’s logic and AI in Java in order to use multi-threading, the obstacle of Flash getting dumb under deep recursions, and the fact that Java is faster than Flash by many ways. On the other hand, there’s the option to use chunking (a method to split recursion into smaller ‘chunks’) which will make this project more challenging and fun. Eventually this will be handed as a university project so you will only be able to find it here and not commercialized in the web.

As for my own project, I started really working on one only last week. I had many ideas since of what I want to develop since Star Relic, most of them are big and demanding project I have always wanted to produce. Last month I decided that I should focus on smaller scale projects due to the current lack of time and resources (three concurrent projects are enough, no?). And thus, I started working on the third game under the Indigon label:

More information in the future to come.

And for the end – good news: Star Relic is nominated this year for the first Israeli Game Awards under the independent games category. The winners will be announced on November 9th.

Anyway, this exam period started 2 weeks ago, and I already find myself spending more time at work and developing my own ideas. I know some of you are eager to know what I’m brewing next. No, it’s not Star Relic 2 as some asked, but rather a tribute to my favorite game of all times. If you’re curious, either: find out what is that game OR find a clue I left somewhere in the site ^_-.

When this exam period is over, I’ll try to update the blog more frequently. Those of you who are interested in my new projects – stay tuned.

Star Relic has been published by now only on a few sites but is already quite successful. With 120k players so far, a NewGrounds’ Daily 5th prize, and an awesome 4.3/5.0 review in JayIsGame I cannot complain. And that is not all! I already have fans! I never had fans! Players wanting to create RPGs based on the lore of the game,  a few more non-exclusive licenses sold to sponsors, and… take a look at this:

“Just wanted to drop you a line to say thanks for such a great flash game, developers like yourselves keep the gaming community fresh and fun.”

(Holy.)

I decided the best approach to handle this is to start building a small community around Indigon. I always believed communities are the core of small/indie games. It’s time I shall nurture one. There is nothing like a small group of loyal fans who track every update about your future projects and try to document the small text of the Klosian Nebula star systems… Thus, the AMAZING INDIGON’S FLASH STUDIO FORUMS were formed. Currently they look like a shoe-box, but in the future they will be fully integrated into the blog. (Update: the link is no longer valid).

Now that they are set up and I told you a little about the success of Star Relic, some plans for the upcoming two weeks: I am planning to continue the distribution of Star Relic to the many-many Flash portals across the web, hopefully getting more than one million views by the end of June. Work on my new mega-secret game currently called Unannounced Project (creative) has begun, but now consists only of writing a design document (I am not going to repeat the mistake of Star Relic again…).

The factions of Star Relic in their full glory

Soon in a table-top RPG? O_o

To conclude, I decided to share some early Star Relic graphics, from the time I had a completely different idea in mind. If you don’t know, Star Relic was originally an arcade/simulation game, where the player controlled a fully upgraded star ship in the Klosian Nebula, fighting Sodinar scum and warping to various adventures. While I adore this concept, I didn’t feel ready enough to develop something in that scale back then. And now? Who knows what the future holds for Indigon Flash Studio ;)?

Enjoy, and don’t forget to visit the forums!

Star Relic is now out to the public! You can play it on the sponsor’s website here. The game will be distributed to more websites in the upcoming weeks.

What a relief. After a year in development (and a few vacations in between), it’s finally out. Now… Now it is time to start working on another game.

Enjoy the game!

Play Star Relic

I accepted a bid on Star Relic after a month it was on FlashGameLicense.com (FGL). The game will be sponsored by FlashRelax and will be online next week.

The fact is I am a bit disappointed, since I am about to receive a small amount of payment for it compared to the time it was under development. As I claimed in previous posts – development without a definite idea in mind is a disaster. Star Relic was modified and patched with ideas and mechanics throughout the development. While people who play it are enjoying the orbit mechanics, many others claim the game is too difficult to understand.

Doh. This is true. But when I look back, this is not actually a problem for me. I have started developing games not only because of the potential profit, but because I enjoy playing games, thinking of new ideas, implementing them, and sharing them to the world.

Oh well. There is still much to learn and improve. :)

On the other hand, Star Relic was not in vain. After showing the game shortly on a monthly meeting of Israeli game developers, I was recruited for a new studio called Imba Games. Obviously, I cannot speak of the nature of the games I am developing there at the moment.