I'm happy to announce the release of a new game: Snow Day! This game was my entry into the latest contest from MochiMedia. The contest theme was "too cool for school" and had a rule that game control was to be restricted to a single input device. I found out about the contest a bit late and had less than a week to get my game done. All things considered, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.
The game itself consists of four casual, winter-themed minigames. The premise is pretty simple: school is cancelled due to snowfall and so the neighborhood kids get together for a day of fun! By going the minigame route I was able to really capitalize on the single input device rule and offer smaller, but different experiences in terms of gameplay. Also, the quick games and leaderboards encourage players to compete for higher scores without demanding a huge time investment.
A friend of mine has been working hard on this game in his spare time for several years now and the game is finally ready to be released! The timing couldn't have worked out better considering Steam's recently launched Greenlight service. Rhythm Destruction is unique in that it blends the rhythm genre with the classic gameplay of a bullet-hell shooter! Check out the trailer below and please head over to the project's greenlight page and up vote it so that the game can be released on Steam!
I've recently been toying around with the Axel Game Library (www.axgl.org). I'm really liking the library so far as it is based on Flixel, but also utilizes hardware rendering. This means you get better performance and is especially nice for mobile devices. (more...)
One of the most talked about features in the new Flash Player 11.4 beta is the new concurrency model which allows developers to spawn worker threads to handle intensive operations. While many people are singing the praises of multithreading, I can't help but to feel like this may not be such a great thing.
I've always had certain misgivings about multithreading. Without question, threading has become common practice for achieving performance gains through parallelism in programming. However, just because something becomes accepted practice does not necessarily mean that it's a good thing. If you want an exhaustive look into the topic, I recommend reading Edward A. Lee's report The Problem with Threads. The author is a distinguished professor and former chair of Berkeley's Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department. (more...)
If you've played many online games, you've probably seen the puzzle simulations where an image is cut up into pieces and randomly arranged. The goal is to click pieces and move them to reform the original image. In this tutorial you will learn the basics of how to create this type of game. If you want to take a sneak peek at the finished product, you can do so here. (more...)
