Sunday, July 29, 2007

Games: Square Nine Update

Square Nine is still doing great at wiicade. It has a 3.3 rating and 4500+ games played. I think it was a fine addition.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Games: Klondike, Spider, Fours Solitaire

This last week, I put together my first pass at a card game engine.

The card engine supports Decks, Cards, and Undo. Decks can shuffle, add/remove cards, set drag/drop restrictions, and draw in various ways. Cards have info about themselves and can be moved about. The Undo engine allows moves to be undone.

The classes were used to build three solitaire games: The Classic Klondike, Spider, and Fours. The current implementations work but are not heavily tested. The most obvious piece missing is polish.

The game itself just has to layout the positions for multiple decks, establish the drag/drop restrictions, create undo behaviors, check for victory, and in the case of Klondike -- write the autocompletion routine.

Klondike, the last in this series, was working in about 4 hours with 4 more hours of cleanup and refactoring to the card and deck class.

I hope to add animation for the cards next. And the games need sound and general polish. Likely in August.

Note: I used a deck of SVG cards from David Bellot. I was disappointed that Adobe Illustrator would not convert them to the Flash format. I expect to replace the cards and card backs as they are way to big (a bitmap for each one) and look bad (because they are imported from a bitmap).

Friday, July 6, 2007

Flash: Testimonials

I put together a testimonials movie yesterday from a Craiglist request. The request was a little old (mid-June) but it seemed like a simple enough project that had potential widespread use. Here is the demo. The donation route hasn't been working and so I think perhaps the freelance one will.

Thursday, July 5, 2007

Framework: Cards

The card game framework is finally underway.

One of the first steps is to get card images. For now, I am using a free SVG deck and sliced up the image using SliceImage. SlideImage was really nifty and saved me at least an hour of cropping out each of the cards from a composite image.

The other thing of note is that I am trying both a scrum for one and Test-Driven Design. Every day there will be some refactoring too. How extreme of me!

I expect to release the framework (for Flash 7 because it must run on the Wii) when I am done with the first game using it.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Games: Square9 ratings

After the first day on WiiCade.com, SquareNine has a 3.5 rating with 250+ games played.

July 6 Update: 750+ games played and a 3.4 rating.

Game: SquareNine

I just released a new Flash mini-game: SquareNine. It was built with the Wii in mind so it plays nicely on that system. If you like it, head to WiiCade.com to vote for it. It needs to have a 2.5 or higher rating to survive its probation period. It needs a 3.4 or so to be on the first page of the puzzle games.

If you are reading this an either want the source or to post it on another site, let me know.

Improvements over my last mini-game (Slider) is a preloader, sounds aren't on the first frame (sound movieclip with stop() on the first frame and the sounds loaded in frames 2 through N), and a really nice visual score history/meta game. My art still needs help though.