Two Things: Dolphin Squadron and Boatventure 2013

If I wasn't happy about this, then I don't know what happiness is!

So, Dolphin Squadron released on May 31st at 12PM and since then, the game has been fairly successful and at the very least has completely blown my expectations out of the water! The pun, ...sadly was intended. To recap the events up until now, here is a list.

Demo

• Featured on Indiegames and Russian indie blog, True Indie Games. Pretty fucking awesome day for us before we even did anything! Inspiring.

Release (DOWNLOAD HERE: http://acpcproductions.com/ds)

- Featured in a mash-up at Indiegames with games like Mutant Mudds Deluxe and Teslagrad!
- Feature at IndieStatik and our longest feature (word count) yet!
- DS was top 3 at Reddit r/IndieGaming for roughly a day. Dropped steadily afterwards.
- Front-page primary feature at GameJolt for a few days. Currently secondary feature.
- 4.8/5 review score at GameJolt.
- Featured again by True Indie Games.
- Blogged about by my friend's game blog, Distorted Travesty.
- Five or Six LP videos of DS and one First Impression (so far).

- Ryan befriends editors and administrators of GameJolt, IndieStatik and Indiegames. :)

I'd actually say that I'm already more than fucking happy with the turn out.

I'll update with the general statistics of the game on Friday when I wake up! At the same time, don't expect ridiculous numbers! Haha. It was still my first actually complete game and my expectations were low, so I was ecstatic even with my reasonably low numbers. :)

Boatventure 2013

Open in new tab for full size!! And follow us. ;P

I started doing some mock-ups of how the game would actually look using the assets we made at the ACPCP Official Progress Jam a few months ago. I'm honestly, extremely satisfied for the most part. The bottom picture is the most recent and depicts what the game would look like earlier on in the game. The top picture (made before I found the bigger assets...hence blurriness) would be like JUST starting. 

Notice how the game zooms out as your progress. This will be to accommodate the larger ships and action as the game progresses. I was going for an exponential growth type of idea, but we'll see how the artists (and Flash) feel about that kind of stuff. If it doesn't work here, I like to consider all of my games polished prototypes, so perhaps I'll revisit it in the future...says Ryan who hasn't even really started on this game yet. :X

Regardless, I'm a happy duck (subtle reveal of another game? Perhaps.) So...

Expect Greatness~

Ryan Huggins

P.S: It was a reveal.

Ducktics.

Working With Flash

A great environment.

After working in Game Maker 8.1x for a pretty long time to build games, I figured it was about time I started learning another environment for designing and developing games in. Game Maker 8.1 is a good program, and is very capable of doing what I wanted it to do with my 2D projects, though I felt limited only knowing one or two programs for game creation. Enter FlashDevelop + FlashPunk. (To be honest however, I may end up using Game Maker (Studio) to make a lot of my older game ideas because I know it best.)

It's been a blast messing around in a new engine/language...so finding myself reading code snippets on my phone in the middle of the night to learn the language pretty much sealed the deal for me and Flash (at least for Project Fall). Moving over from Game Maker 8.1 to FlashDevelop + FlashPunk has been a fairly smooth transition and the object orientation of FlashPunk has been very helpful in allowing me to learn AS3 quickly. Still though, I'm kind of a noob, so I have a bit of practice before I can actually make anything worthwhile with the program!

I've been using the FlashPunk official website and official forums to learn the language and build games and Zachary Lewis's tutorials have taught me pretty much everything I need to know to get my hands dirty with the program even if I'll have some trouble for awhile.

To be honest though, the only real issue I'm having right now is that I'm having trouble referencing variables from other classes and I figure that it's only my newbie-ness preventing me from doing something so basic. I figure that I've learned enough about the engine to begin porting the Fall prototype over into Flash and I can only hope that the performance issues that plague Flash as a game development platform doesn't become a serious issue for me! -.- Wish me luck!

Expect greatness. Ryan Huggins~