Next steps
Subterfuge is, of course, out! It has been getting positive feedback, although the general consensus is that it’s a big short and some unit upgrades would extend the gameplay. I agree with both points, and will integrate these (and other!) ideas in the sequel. It’s gotten around half a million plays so far — which, funnily enough, is about equal to the number of copies my last AAA boxed title sold. The difference is that the flash game didn’t cost $25 million to make.
Next up is a concept I’ve always wanted to do - make my own CCG. I played quite a lot of Magic: The Gathering during my college years, and was constantly amazed at its depth of gameplay. I’m going to revisit some of its core concepts (such as “land”, which adds too much of a random luck element), and take it in a more sci-fi/mystical direction. It won’t technically be CCG, since it’s not “collectible”, but who cares. At the moment I’m trying to generalize card and effect structures so that the card database can be completely expressed in XML. Hopefully I should be able to get to a beta state sometime around the end of the month.
Papervision 3D
We’re working on a new game called “Subterfuge”. It’s like Chess meets Stratego, with a sci-fi theme. The gameboard is a grid, with “buildings” which represent blocked squares. Originally it was 2D, with white squares to designate the buildings. However, I realized that it’d be cooler to to represent the gameboard in 3D, which would allow you to give a bit of parallax to the buildings. I could also do a nifty little fly-in! This all required finally getting around to examining something I’d wanted to check out for a while: Papervision 3D . It’s open-source, AS3, and reasonably mature.
The results: 3D in Flash is a clever hack. What Papervision does is essentially to use Flash’s geometry fill functions, add their own math libraries, projection and camera systems, some scene management, and then wrap it up with some object importation and material management. Sounds great! Unfortunately, due to the restrictions of Flash, it lacks a lot of the modern comforts of traditional DirectX hardware programming.
Such as — perspective texture mapping! It’s 1992 all over again! Large polygons have to be subdivided to avoid linear mapping artifacts. Oh, and there’s no z-buffer. Back to bounding-sphere sorting! And since there’s no z-buffer, you don’t get any z-testing or pixel early-out like most hardware cards today perform. Thus, overdraw matters, in a big way.
Nevertheless, what they’ve done is pretty neat. Depth of field can be faked using the Flash 9 blur shader. They’ve implemented bump mapping (!). All in all, a bit limited, and slow — but it has it’s uses. (Such as the grid in our game!)
Speaking of which, we’re just waiting on some art at the moment, and we hope to get a private beta out to sponsors next week. More news to come!
- andrew
Super Fight Fight
My first Flash game is done! Coming from the hardcore 3D world, it wasn’t too hard, really. It took approximately 6 weeks (ish) to write. I started around the end of September, after I got back from AGC. Many weeks weren’t 40 hours of work, some were over, and the holidays interfered quite a bit. I’d never written a web game before, nor a 2D fighter, so there was definitely some learning involved. But I think the end results are pretty good (for my first “shipped” web titles), and I got a nice sponsorship from Armor Games to boot.
Flash 9 timing inaccuracies
Normally, when you’re developing a typical game (PC or console), you want to let the game as fast as it can, and write the gameplay and update routines so that they can compensate for arbitrary frame timings. In the Flash world, however, it is desirable sometimes to have the movie run at a fixed FPS, and have your game logic assume that arbitrary frame rate. If the movie should slow down for some reason, so will your logic, but at least things will be deterministic and stable.
Unfortunately, just because your movie is set to run at, say, 30 fps, doesn’t mean your browser will run it at that frame rate. My current application runs at a solid 30fps in the standalone Flash 9 player, but only manages an anemic 22 fps when viewed in a page via Firefox. IE isn’t much better, and only clocks in at around 24fps. What’s going on? I turned practically everything in the application off (including all graphics), and there was no change in framerate!
Beverage roundup - Green tea - July 2007
I’m a bit of a beverage snob, and my latest fascination is with green tea. It’s genuinely good for you (so they say), and has lots of helpful compounds in it (such as the currently hip antioxidant “ECGC”). Having been into it well before the latest craze started, I’m happy to find all of the major beverage manufacturers jumping on the bandwagon. Brewing your own is nice, but you aren’t going to cart that around
At this point, I’ve tried a number of varieties — both good and bad — and figured I’d post my mini-reviews:
Lipton Green Tea (Citrus) -Yuck. Intensely sweet, and filled with high fructose corn syrup. Has that metallic tang typical of cheap pink lemonade. I’m not sure why they even bother to put this in a bottle.
Arizona Green Tea w/Ginseng and Honey - Mediocre. Very sweet, and the ingredient list has both honey and sucralose (!) which gives it a stranger aftertaste than if they had used regular cane sugar. The sweetness overpowers all other flavors, almost as if the tea itself was an afterthought.
Glaceau Vitamin Water “Rescue” Green Tea - Vitamin Water definitely has some good flavors, and this is one of them. A bit minty, and a hint of lemon in the aftertaste. Vapor distilled water, green tea, some sugar (crystalline fructose), and a bunch of vitamins. It’s on the sweeter side of their lineup, perhaps on the level of the raspberry “Defense” variety. Overall, very drinkable.
Honest Tea - Heavenly Honey Green - Tasty. The tea itself has a slightly smoky flavor. Very lightly sweetened with honey and cane sugar, and the flavor of the honey definitely comes through. All the ingredients are organic, nothing offensive on the list. They also make a “Just Green Tea” which is simply pure green tea (but the complete lack of sweetness gives the tea a bitter edge).
Trader Joe’s - Orange Bergamot Green Tea - Light and subtle. Tea flavor is slightly weak. Tastes slightly sweet, but actually contains no sugar at all. Orange and bergamot give the flavor a citrusy, herbal kick.
The verdict? Well, it depends on your sweet tooth. The perfect green tea, in my estimation would be somewhere between the Vitamin Water and Trader Joe’s blends. (The house green tea at Noodle-ism in Austin, Texas comes very close.)
testing 1, 2, 3
switching the hosting!