Nothing is worse in the world than an infrequently updated blog. Lately I've been working on several different projects to keep my skills fresh and to have fun while doing it. The project that is coming along nicely is the Flash game. Let me tell you how this came to be.

A while ago I started playing around in Flash to see what I could learn about it. I don't really do much art, but I was learning how ActionScript 3 works and was playing around with several ideas for games. The first several ideas I tried either ended up not being fun, or were way too large for me to do alone. Eventually I stumbled across something that was small enough in scope that I could do all the scripting by myself, yet was still fun to play for a while. It was a turret defense type game.

With all the practice I'd been getting from the previous prototypes, I was able to set up a solid structural foundation to ActionScript for the game so that I could easily expand it whenever I decided to. Once the basics were down (aiming the turret base, shooting bullets, detecting collision with things), I was able to start all the experimenting with different weapon types. I must have tried 15 or so different weapon ideas, but I wanted to keep things manageable for the players, so I took the 10 coolest weapons and went from there. The coolest weapon that got left out was a gun that shoots bullets that bounce off of enemies and increase in damage with each bounce. The only problem with that is that I could only get realistic bounces from circular shaped enemies, and I didn't want to make a game with nothing but a lot of different colored floating balls.

Anyway, some people looked at the game and said things like, "Hey, that's an alright piece of work, but get someone who is good at drawing (not you) to do the visuals." I talked to a former classmate of mine, Max, who is good at drawing things. He's helping me now. I'll post some before and after pics once we get stuff in there.