So whats everyone been up to?

[tomsamson]

Hey there all, i´ve been working on a game a lot the last few days (weeks) so just getting to read up on all the posts now.
Cool to see more chime in =)

And another old regular signing in here Cool to see that there are still some familiar usernames here after all these years.

I've been doing flash games for clients and for my own site. Just released a new game this week: Dibblez Adventernity
And I'm finally going to switch from Flash 5 (not CS5, but 5, when Actionscript 1 was brand new) to CS5.5. Should be interesting...

Oh, sweet, hey there Olorin , very nice to see you checking in here, too =)
I tried your Dibblez Adventure, nice game =)
I like it that after the first tutorial screen it jumps right into the action with several enemies attacking one =)
After playing several levels the only things that felt off to me were:
-When completing a level/room the text in the stats boxes shows like in times new roman, maybe the font isn´t embedded
-also on that screen it says one would have to be logged in to get the progress saved but there´s no option right there to login, have the progress saved and continue.
Besides that, well, i always liked your friendly dibblez games =)
I´m almost scared to ask, how is your experience with CS5.5 now? =)


Regarding the whole html 5 talk, i totally agree with Squize who said this:

Nah not touched it mate, don't want to. I want to make games, not mess around with tech for tech's sake.
As far as I'm aware there's nothing in HTML5 that can't be done in Flash, so it would be a backward step. I don't do agency work anymore so I'd don't have to whore myself out by learning it.

Squize.

For quite a while now i´m still getting into a lot of new tech, languages, tools etc but only if they bring some kind of advantage for what i´m doing over what i already use, not when the only benefit there is is that its hyped up as "the hot new ****" (while in many cases it really is worse than the stuff we already use).
With what´s called html5 the only reason it could have an advantage to me over flash/unity etc right now would be if it ran the same on all browsers without requiring a plugin and that´s just not the case at all when one does heavy interactive media mashups (which games are all about).
When its just about websites though and there stuff that can be done nicely in html+js i´m all for not using flash for that then =)

@Malee: Yeah very cool regarding your pacman mate, but yeah, i imagine how painful that must have been to do in html js combo, that´s probably also why we usually mostly only see such stuff done in html+js as experimental learning project one offs or when paid by MS or another bigwig to promote their browsers etc, i don´t see many others making games as usual every day hobby or job that way at all (yet).

Btw cool Renderhjs is sitting behind you, say hi, he´ll probably groan about my negativity again if he sees me talking about html5 =)

hooligan, no molehill for me yet, I keep wanting to do some abstract demo type stuff with it, but just don't have the time.
...
I've never been an early adopter, I came to as3 relatively late. I find it's best letting the clever people figure stuff out and learn from them.

Squize.

Thought that was interesting, too =) For me its more a depends on what it is about =)
Like, is it usable at all now or when and how soon i think it will be ready and/or if i think my feedback and support would make it get closer to a cool state =)
Like with html5 stuff i feel like that´s years off to get anywhere close to what one can do in flash, unity etc regarding making games, since i´m mostly making games today i have no interest in that at all.

With flash and molehill i´m cautious and in "let´s wait and see" mode, too, the molehill demos all look very promising but yeah, i´ve been tricked way too often by Adobe hyping things up more than they could deliver so for now i´ll just wait until that runtime is released in final form on all platforms and i can see it performing great then before i spend too much time on it.

With several other tools, mostly 3D or game creation middleware though i´m an active beta tester though and quite excited about those when seeing how those have way faster update cycles and i also feel like the current thing is more usable for my needs and more of the feedback of the beta testers also actually gets listened to and bugs fixed etc in a timely fashion.

Just as comparison example: Recently i received a mail from Adobe support regarding a bug report i had files over 3 years ago. They wrote that they are working through old bugs and wanted to check back if i thought this was still an important issue.
While i thought its cool that they consider working through old bugs now i thought if he didn´t get how hilarious it is to ask whether a bug report i filed 3 years ago is still of importance to me, well, dunno what i could say to make em get that, so i haven´t replied to it =)

Compare that to let´s say udk where Epic releases a new dot version update with many improvements in pretty much monthly cycle or unity where its every few months (but in return with longer beta test phase).
Anyway, enough on that =)


@kdsh: Man, its been ages, hey there, how you doin? =)


@Ray: Man, that´s depressing =(
I see it like some of the others, i see a stronger focus on some money making ways (Facebook stuff, micro transaction stuff, while well, advertising clients business and demand is still high, payments of most portals when its about "sponsored" game releases aren´t that huge usually and going more and more towards paying dumping prices rates on most (if paying anything at all)).
I suggest if you want to stick with flash and if performance is an issue for the stuff you make then well, looks like not a big way around that with flash other than using stuff like Scaleform or using the new molehill apis.


@SonOfBrye: oh, cool you work at Soap, too, didn´t know that, some nice stuff you made for em, too =)
Also nice you got into trying unity, too =)

I like Unity, but it has a lot of quirks of its own. The concept of building a game out of an already made game engine was a bit different for me, and it took a while to figure out how to do small things like instantiating objects through code. But it's easy as hell once you get over the speed bumps, I think. And I very much like that it's fast.

Yeah, i think those were pretty much my initial experiences with it, too =)
After using it for a longer while now i still feel that way on many ends with it, right now its still like the bizarro world brother of flash to me, everything that is bad to do or won´t run (well) at all when done in flash is usually super easy and nicely doable in unity and in return a bunch of things like just doing a basic 2d gui which is super easy to do in flash can take quite a while in unity, due to the lack of built-in visual workflow 2D graphics layout features.
Well, that may change soon when one of the next dot versions has that new 2D system built in in a few months, let´s see =)
But yeah, after all this time i still like it a lot that it performs so nicely on all platforms =) Though yeah, usually one gets into then maxing out those limits after a while, too =)

@Squize and Lux: Lovely, lovely art there, sweet you are doing some cool stuff together, looking forward to your new game =)
I first thought a scary 2d game in flash? but yeah, that art totally convinced me it could turn out quite nice =)