My Flash education continues. Today’s entry is a Flash attempt number two. The main goal this weekend was to develop a game-loop that updated 60 frames a second. Needing a game to hang this lofty goal on, I sketched out a little game called:
Radial Solo Ball for Firefox/Opera
Radial Solo Ball for IE
This is about 8 hours of work. It has a couple of bugs, mostly collision, which I hope to clean up as I add the remaining features. But it is a fully playable game, which I’m pretty happy about. I’ve posted my extensive design document for Radial Solo Ball. I made it most of the way through Phase 3. Phase 4 should be easy, I just need to solve some of the collision bugs to make it worthwhile. Phase 5 is crazy, but I’d like to tackle this eventually, as it would be good to have as part of the prototyping toolkit.
I’m enjoying Flash. It cracks me up that the game is about a third the size of the Jpeg of the design document.
Give it a try, let me know what you think. Comments are open for just such things.
-game over-
Thanks for reading another action-packed installment of Design a Day. For background on the Design A Day challenge, take a peek here and here.
Nothing ground-breaking tonight, just a fun little idea that emerged title-first into the world.
Miss Information
Miss Information is an RPG set in an American High School.
The character classes include:
- Drama Queen
- Cheerleader
- Jock
- Outsider
- Stoner
- Over-Achiever
Battlestar Galactica Producer Ponders New Video Game
I’ve thought about doing something where you start a property across mediums, with Internet participation and role-playing video games,” he says. “Not every show or property will lend itself to that type of hybrid environment, but if you set it up from the get-go to design it that way, I think that’s a really rich and interesting place for the business to go.
That’s a potentially great idea. I’ve explored parts of this approach in DD7 and DD18. The natural conclusion to this line of thinking is the Ubiquitous Game. the Ubiquitous Game can be played online, through various clients on various platforms, including Browsers, SMS, IM and email. There would also be aspects of the game that are played or participated in offline. Scratch tickets and collectible card games that unlock in-game merchandise, television shows based-off (or the genesis of), which reference in-game events, and drop subtle hints to new in-game content, real-world team collaborations to solve puzzles, crossover experiences in other games and media.
No one of these ideas is particularly new, see Majestic, see X-Quest , see games based on movies based on comic books , see geo-caching and games like PerplexCity , Masquerade.
Alone they are interesting, crafted into a cohesive experience, they could become quite compelling.
(Thanks to John B for digging up this on teamXbox.com, and Bill B for the heads up on X-Quest)
Why We Need a Corporation for Public Gaming
However, serious games, like serious TV, are likely to remain a sidebar in the history of mass media. Non-commercial television floundered, despite millions of dollars of investment by the Ford Foundation, until the government stepped in and created a viable and long-lasting alternative. With similar vision and foresight, and a relatively small amount of funding, this could happen with video and computer games.
A Corporation for Public Gaming (CPG) could be established that would operate on a model similar to its broadcasting equivalent, providing grants to develop a diversity of games for the public good. Like CPB, the goal of the CPG would be to provide high-quality games, which “inform, enlighten and enrich the public.”
An interesting proposal from David Rejeski at Serious Game Source. A step towards Warhammer 401k?
(via BoingBoing )
I spent a lot of time as a kid in “The Pirate’s Den,” an unsavory arcade in the local mall. I’d play all the games at least once, but there were a few I gravitated to.
Some of those games that had a really unique and enjoyable feel to the players avatar as it moved through the world. They included Omega Race, Space Duel and Joust.
Though each of these games merits playing (Omega Race on the original hardware if possible), Joust is my focus tonight, because it explores a special niche, aerial melee combat.
There are a number of ways to think about aerial melee combat. Does a jump-kick count? No. That’s more in the falling-with-style category. Many flying games kill you and the enemy if you collide, so perhaps this is a nod to the melee attack, as one-shot-one-kill.
Almost all flying games that feature combat fall into the FPS or third-person shooter category (a sweeping statement..am I wrong?). That’s why I find the notion of the aerial melee game fascinating.
So let’s talk raptors.
I’ve made a small update to the Design-a-Tron. I had a request to make the text selectable to make it easier to email/IM the gems. So:
- Donkey Konga meets Lawrence Of Arabia as Simulation Game
- Monkey Island meets The Proper Role Of Government as Urban Sociology
- Half-Life 2 meets Starship Troopers as Feudalism
- The Sims Online meets His Girl Friday as Fuzzy Logic
- F.E.A.R meets The Graduate as Capitalism
Enjoy!
Design-a-Day will update this evening.
Welcome! I promised some news today, and here it is.
There was a lot of talk at GDC this year about prototyping. I have been very keen to get the ball rolling, prototype-wise, and to that end I have started learning Flash, and Action Script. Tonight, I unveil the fruits of this weekend’s labor, my first Flash project. Please, hold your applause until the end of the performance.
My plan is to intersperse, at irregular intervals, Flash prototypes of certain design ideas and elements of gameplay in the updates to Design a Day.
This is not going to happen with the current publication schedule, so I am going to switch to a M-W-F update schedule for Design a “Day.” I’m still targeting 50 designs, it will just take a few more weeks to get there.
So without further ado, I present…The Chrome Cow Burroughsian Design-A-Tron!
I took a speed reading course and read ‘War and Peace’ in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
Woody Allen
The title for today’s missive is inspired by Mr. Allen.
I’ve been playing (practicing?) Brain Age on the Nintendo DS ever so briefly, when I can get it away from Sonja, and have really been enjoying it (and no, I’m not going to tell you what my brain age is, at least until I’ve logged a few more hours).
I’ve been thinking about the lessons we should draw from the success of Brain Age in Japan. The obvious one is, “There is a demand for games/activities to help people loosen up the old neurons.” But I think that’s misses a more important lesson.
Brain Age is the offspring of a wildly popular book in Japan, “Train Your Brain”. Nintendo found a very popular mass market book (emphasis on mass), one that had a great design potential, and produced a game with a feature set which that same mass market felt comfortable buying.
In what may appear to be an aside, I also wanted to look at another popular game, a table-top game called Cranium. Sold at Starbucks, this is a social game that appeals to the coffee-shop crowd with clever questions and gameplay that rewards creative minds.
The common thread here, if there is one, is that you sell your audience a game they feel comfortable playing. Match the gameplay features to the market you’re targeting.
Which brings us to The Da Vinchi Code.
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