Oh man, nine months since my last post, that is incredible. Not sure why I keep this thing up here.

What have I been up to? I said in my last post that I was hoping to get back into XNA, I fiddled with it for a while and wrote a prototype game that used the Guitar Hero controller; it was a hybrid sh'mup slash rhythm game, but I couldn't quite get it to be fun.

I've been working hard on Ready To Ship, the new application I've been developing at work, and that's kind of kept me from wanting to do anymore coding at home. I did have an idea for a collaborative web game thing, kind of inspired by Real Lives and Kudos, but with user created events and a paper doll avatar system. I still hope to get it going at some point because I think there's potential there for a lot of funny stuff.

Kurodust is gearing up to record and release their second album, so that's been my main creative outlet for the past 6 months or so. We're working on finding an artist to do some cheap work for us so we can redesign the website and figure out the album art. If we can't find anybody I guess I'll just pass myself of as an artist again and come up with something.

Things I was hoping to do but haven't got around to: redesigning this blog, taking piano lessons, actually finishing another game. I guess that's a short list, so that's not too bad.

Until June!

I didn't make the cut I did get an honourable mention though, which places me in the top 15 out of over 50 entries, so I guess that's still pretty good for my first flash game.

There were a bunch of good entries that got submitted in the last week or so, some of which took the prime places in the final standings. I'm a bit disappointed in some of the results, but I can see that my game had a few problems that probably cost it a place.

I agree with most of the decisions made by the judges, though I didn't really think Wiggi Fire Mission deserved sixth place, definitely not above Galactic Mediator which took seventh. I also thought Wiggi Walk was a bit too simple to be so high in the standings, but it was well made and showed the values they were looking for, though I still think most of the entries were a bit heavy handed in that area.

Oh well, onward and upward! I am waiting to find out whether blogging the progress of my game is legal in the JayIsGames contest, if so I'll have the prototype of my first entry done in the next few days. I'm making sure not too aim too high when it comes to the graphics this time, and the hard bits for the physics are already worked out so I'm feeling quite confident.

I've started adding a few blogs by Flash developers who are doing some interesting things: fellow Melbournian Michael Battle seems to share my fascination with automated agents and emergent gameplay, and Martin at Grapefrukt.com who is also big on prototyping gameplay elements. Hey guys!

The WiggiWorld (whoops, apparently it's WoogiWorld now) contest is over, and the winners should be announced in the next couple of days. I think I'm still in with a chance to be in the top 7 and therefore winning $500, but there were a few good entries submitted in the last week which will drop me down a few places, I'm sure.

In retrospect I should have pushed the values they wanted a bit more; at the very least I should have put some 'Did you know...' type things between the levels to provide a bit more education. To tell the truth, I find that most of the entries are shoving the values down the kid's throats, but I don't know if my entry being more subtle will gain me any points.

I also think I should have gone with something more simple, especially as this was my first flash game; it seems that the games that are simpler and more polished are leading the way, such as Veggie-Matic and Wiggi Dance Academy.

The JayIsGames 4th Casual Game contest has started now as well, the theme is Ball Physics; I've had a couple of ideas, but haven't really got started on prototyping anything yet. I'm hoping to do so tonight. Unfortunately the rules of the contest specify that the game can't have been published anywhere else on the web, so I won't be able to document the process very thoroughly, though perhaps I'll do so anyway and just publish it after the contest is complete.

This is an idea I had a few weeks ago, mostly inspired by the wonderful game Katamari Damacy. I thought it could be a good idea to simplify the base concept into a simple 2D game.

I started with the basic idea that you can consume circles which are larger than you, and are damaged by those larger than you. Here's my first draft, use the arrow keys to move.

You probably noticed that this by itself is not particularly fun; you quickly become either quite large or quite small, and that's pretty much the end of the game. (I didn't bother putting in win/lose conditions for the prototype, but you can imagine what they would be)

So, what's the next step? Well, let's test out my list of ingredients. We've obviously hit the first mark: the game is quite simple. Too simple at the moment. Let's take it a bit further then, and add a sense of progression (and competition, since we'll have a measurement now to compare against our friends).

The simple addition of a size value gives this game some more meaning, and a reason for playing. I took a note from Katamari's book and did a quick and nasty pull back in scale when you get to a certain size; this doesn't work especially well when you have no real life objects to scale it against, but it means that the score could go up indefinitely if you played well enough. I could probably clean this game up in it's current state and release it as a nice little diversionary game. (Needs better physics, better zoom effect, maybe some effects when the balls hit each other)

What would push this game (I think) from a nice diversion to something more popular? Another ingredient, style. Katamari has style, if you were just a ball rolling around picking up random shapes (like in the tutorial) you would get bored very quickly, but given the quirky style, different environments and fantastic music, the game becomes a hit. (And hey, they're about to release the 4th installment and are barely changing the gameplay, so that shows you how far style can go)

I'm not going to continue to develop this game, because it's actually been done before. Check out Cosmic Crush. (I'd forgotten about this game when I came up with the idea originally) If I was going to continue though, I'd need to think of something unique, it would need to suit the setting, and (for me) it would need to be easy to draw. So...

That'll do. Maybe a little too much like Spore to be completely unique, but oh well. (This is a very quick and rough example, but it already gives you a better sense of scale changing and makes it more interesting to play)

Stay tuned for my next gameplay idea, which I'm hoping will turn out a bit more fun!

I've been thinking hard about gameplay and the importance it plays in games, especially in casual games, and I realised that if I'm going to create something popular and fun then I'm going to need to make sure my ideas are feasible before I put too much time and effort into them.

This is where prototyping is going to come in useful. I've decided that for any gameplay ideas I have, I'm going to whip up something quickly that gives me a chance to see how it will play before I start creating graphics, menus, etc., which will save me a large amount of time if it turns out that, no, that idea actually sucks.

This isn't always a useful step, of course; if the main draw of your game is the style in which you're doing it, then stock standard gameplay may do the trick, in which case you pretty much know that it's fun already. If you're bringing something new into the gameplay in any way, however, prototyping the base gameplay before getting into the more time consuming stages of development is definitely wise.

I'm going to be putting together some prototypes for some simple game ideas over the next couple of days, and I think it'll be interesting to see whether they turn out to be fun, tedious or in between.

I've noticed somewhat of a trend when it comes to those casual games (usually Flash, but not always) that get the most popularity and acclaim, and are the most addictive and fun (the latter leading to the former, generally). I hope to use these concepts in my next game, but perhaps they will be useful to others looking for ideas as well.

So here we go.

Simplicity

I think this has to be number one; the simplest concepts are the easiest for players to grasp, and are often the most addictive as there are no complex rules to learn or stories to follow. It's obvious what you have to do and it's just a matter of doing it well enough or for long enough to accomplish your goal.

This is not a hard and fast rule, of course, but there should still always be a clear goal and a clear method of achieving it; if the player is confused about what to do they're just going to stop playing.

Examples: Red, Double Jeu

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Take a look.

I'm mostly happy with the way it turned out, though like most projects I kind of just wanted to get it done at the end and rushed to finish it. I probably could have polished it up a bit more and added a few more features, but you've got to draw the line and those last few things would have dragged out too long.This is my first flash game and my first submission to Newgrounds, so it was an interesting experience. Newgrounds is a pretty well made site (though their forums kinda suck, no subscriptions or editing posts?), and it was kinda fun watching the votes pile up as soon as it went up there, the site is very heavily trafficked. (Though submitting it right before I went to bed probably wasn't a wise decision, I was kept up all night with thoughts of voting and flash ideas hammering through my head)

So, here's hoping I win some money from this contest, it would be a pretty good achievement to get some cash for my first flash game. I have some ideas for a couple of new games, but before starting on them I'm going to wait for the announcement of the new JayIsGames contest, which has a $2500 cash prize. I'll have 2 months for development, and I'm going to try to blog the steps more thoroughly this time.

The first glimpse of Rock Band in motion was seen this week (though it seems to have since disappeared from the Internet), and holy shit, it looks fantastic. I mean, Guitar Hero III looks cool, but it's just going to be something to fill the time before Rock Band comes out; can't wait to try out those drums. I still haven't decided which peripheral package I'm going to buy: the new guitar looks great but since I can use my X-Plorer I'll probably buy the drums first. If I have the money though, I might just splurge and buy the whole package. I know, I'm a consumer whore, but seriously, Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II have given me the most gameplay value for my money in a long long time, so I figure it's worth it.

I've made some good progress on the game I'm working on for the WiggiWorld contest, if I get time to work on it over the weekend I may even get it finished, although finding some non-copyrighted sound effects may take a bit of time. I've been putting up my latest versions, so if you want to check out what I'm doing you might be lucky and find my latest test version there. Keep in mind a lot of the graphics are still place holders and there are still a few bugs to work out.

I'm really enjoying working in Flash and I'm kind of anxious to finish this game so I get working on some other ideas. It's quite possible that Kurodust Fighter may eventually see the light of day in Flash rather than XNA...

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Game programming would be so much easier if it weren't for all the damned maths. What frustrates me is I've dealt with this exact same problem before, but my brain's just not in the right place to think about it, no matter how hard I might try.

I've moved away from my Tower Defense style game for the moment to try to put together an entry for a contest I found on the NewGrounds BBS, it's pretty much a derivation of Joust, but with some kiddy graphics and a bit of educational value (which are requirements for the contest). My brain is having difficult working through simple bounding box collisions at the moment though, so I'm not working on it any more tonight.

Sorry, I should say the collisions part isn't what I'm having difficulty with, because MovieClip.hitTest does that for me, it's what to do with each object after a collision is detected. I pretty much just want to do a projection and move the character so it's not overlapping the level object anymore, but that's complicated by the fact that what I'm actually doing the detection against are sub-clips of each object, so the different co-ordinate systems come into play.

It's probably not actually that difficult a problem, but I've been wrestling with it all evening trying to get my head around it, and I'm just not there. (This is why I failed my Maths course at Uni the first time)

I'm pretty much back to where I was before I started the upgrade to ActionScript 3.0, with a greater knowledge of Flash in general and ActionScript in particular, which feels good. Now I can really start getting into the meat of the gameplay.

The thread I posted yesterday had quite a few useful tidbits, two of which spring to mind as not being necessarily obvious (at least, they were things I overlooked):

• All classes need to go within a package {} block
• Don't forget to put 'public' at the start of your classes, or you'll get an error
• Event handling functions require an Event object parameter

Just a few things that tripped me up, so hopefully anybody reading this and looking into ActionScript 3 won't spend too long trying to figure out what their problem is.