Hippies

So I have been greatly distracted over the last week or so by matters than have nothing to do with game development. Well some of them do and others don't, in the same way that some games are good and others are terrible. I find that the game is not about making a game that will make a profit, but instead making a game that will make a difference. A game that will inspire people to be better people or that will allow people to be better people and one that impacts their lives and creates a change in their mind-state by creating awareness not FUD.

This evolution of the game industry will come about ultimately because of the mind-set of hippies. Those free loving spirits who roam the world implanting the idea of love and happiness instead of fear uncertainty and doubt. I admit I've been a dispenser of doubt in my time, often I find myself talking to a stubborn person and telling them that their position could be wrong and that they should doubt themselves and look deeper in order to understand better, instead of thinking they already know the truth. This isn't quite the same as the bad kind of doubt, but it is a slippery slope.

So what has been happening that has caused me to talk of love and free spirits? I watched a movie. The Transformers movie to be exact and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But I also noticed that it has a go at government agencies, and how much they try their best to cover important information up. The information is important in the sense that knowing the information would have helped the public better deal with the catastrophe that eventuated (except that wouldn't be much of a story now would it. Also Independence Day followed almost the exact same story-line but thats a different matter).

This farce is revealed as more of a footnote, in the credits, in an interview of the main characters parents. Where they say most blatantly "if there were any aliens in america the government would be the first to inform the people" (paraphrased). This almost certainly is a portrayal of how ignorant the population actually is of how the government and its agencies are run.

The other thing that happened to me was that, I watched a movie. This one was called Zeitgeist. Some may have seen it on reddit and google videoand from other sources. This movie is the most disturbing portrayal of recent political history I've ever seen and it's basis is attempting to be as factual as possible, but at the same time attempting to empower people to do their own research and learn the truth for themselves. This is a commendable effort put forth by a few people and the film is very compelling. I just wish it would get a distribution deal so that more people could see it.

These two things have convinced me that such openness is possible for games, while at the same time being compelling and relevant. So I commend you hippies for showing me the way towards creating morally important and relevant games. The structure of such games could be implanted into the game mechanics in the same way that fear and uncertainty are built into the game Eternal Darkness or that moral decisions are built into Black and White and Fable. Alternatively they could be put into the story, for instance Deus Ex.

These games are all really well made games are their designs are something to live up to and extend, to provide the compelling moral experience required for new games to be relevant and inspirational.

Other Projects

Because I haven't written down any of my thoughts in a while, I'd side swipe any readers (if there are any) with a double post! So heres the second in the chain.

I've been busy with exams. This is true of any university student around examination time (and many grumblings will be had about such exams, but later). But now that all my exams are over, I can focus my thoughts on more important things, such as my flash games, and also other peoples games.

I guess it was my own fault really. Before exams started, I showed interest in a friends side project because I thought it would get the ball rolling on my own flash game creations. But now that exams are over and I have more time, I want to focus on my games, because I consider them special to me (selfish, no?). But this other project can't be all bad, e.g. I could do it first and then work on my games, or I could work on both things concurrently. This could cause some confusion to me (since they are both games) and I can see one starting to creep into the other pretty quickly.

This wouldn't be an altogether bad thing, however, because it could mean an interesting mashup game would be created. e.g. 'DDR Pong' or 'Breakout Strike: Source', although I doubt either of those titles would succeed whoever made them (even EA, and they market to all the suckers).

The other main thing that could potentially confuse me is that my friends project is going to be written as a java applet, whereas I want to use actionscript to make games. although Writing in two different languages can often help you compare them, the timeframe to do this in is probably not long enough to want to commit to such an under taking of pain (mostly because of java's restrictive type system).

or perhaps I could make a python -> actionscript / java converter that would allow me to use python all the time.

I was wrong, but not incorrect

I was wrong in my decision for not using flex for my games. As it turns out I found a flex game tutorial that provided me the information required to get started.

My first insight into how flash games work is to have multiple canvases for such things as the game, the menu, the information etc. This allows you to define interfaces to these objects which can be used by the other objects to create an overall interactive experience.

The Canvas can be a great tool to provide nested features such as style-able drop down menus (not sure how well the standard ones are to stylise). This can create menus such as the ones found in VectorTD. The full range of possibilities is in my sight now, which is great because before I read this tutorial I had no clue about where to begin my search for insight (and consequently almost threw out an important tool before I had explored its possibilities).

Also Since I am now on the right track, I have created a timer object that can keep better track of time in games in between refreshes. My implementation is based on GameClock in PyGame with GameObjects GameClock. I am not entirely sure how it will fit into my whole project (or even the Flash Display Model) but I am working out the kinks in it so I can have games that will run at constant game-speed as opposed to whatever resources flash can gather. Don't think you've gotten away from this VectorTD. I've noticed that when the flash game loses focus it runs at half the normal play speed (because it's running at half the frame rate), which is annoying when you want to multi-task and finish the game as quickly as possible because you spend more time doing other stuff (like writing blog posts).

Decisions

Its important to be able to use the tools that you have chosen to use. So for me the learning begins here. The first thing i learned was that Flex Builder was not the right tool for the job. It turns out the Adobe Flash is much more useful for creating...well flash.

The reasons for this is because Flex is designed for use to create application environments with drop down boxes and so on. This means that using it to create a game is definitely the wrong approach. Also I would have to deal with mxml stuff. What I was really looking for was a way to create graphical objects and then use them to create an interactive environment which changed depending on how the game was played.

In order to achieve my goal of a good game, I should probably create a few bad games first in order to get the technique right before I make my game of awesome. Because of this i will probably need to copy some old games or make up some crazily easy games. The first thing that springs to mind is Tetris, Pacman etc. However in order to get used to the environment I could possibly have to create some even easier to implement games, such as simple Puzzles and little interactive animations. An idea that comes to mind in this category is something similar to the Wii Play game where you pick identical people out of a crowd and other challenging "spot the difference" type things.

So its been decided. Like any other learning curve, you start out small and get bigger with experience and time.

My first game will be: A puzzle game like Bejewelled (since ive already done something like this in PyGame

How to make an actionscript based game

Hi there,

My name is Mark and im going to be making a game using actionscript which I hope lots of people will enjoy.

The game is being designed by myself and a friend of mine and I thought I would start a blog about my adventures into the land of actionscript and also the serverside code that will eventually run the game.

I've started with a rough guide as to how I'm going to go about it:

Step 1.  Start using flex
Step 2.  Create a game client in actionscript
Step 3.  Create a game server using something else
Step 4.  Get people to play it

at least thats the plan.