Bill's Blazing Games Development Blog

I have decided to move my blog over to blazinggames.blogspot.com so for the few of you who actually do read my blog you can continue doing so from the new location. I am going to leave the existing blog entries here for those who are curious.

A quick update to let readers of this blog know that I have finished adding the six new projects (and depreciating the story project) so I am close to finished this year's overhaul. What is left is to add directory links to all of the game pages. Once that work is done, I am going to start filling out the project pages with additional information to make it clear how people interested in working on the projects (if there is anybody) can participate in the project. I also want to clean up all the documentation for all of the games, but that is something that will be done over a much longer period of time. In fact, this will probably done at the same time as new releases for a game is made. Code wise is kind of interesting at the moment.

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The new update for Blazing Games has been posted, though I still have a lot of work to do yet. What is essentially going to happen is that instead of directories of games, I am moving to a pure project format. Right now, for the sake of ease of transition, there are four projects that correspond to the different categories that I use to place games into. Within the next couple of days, an additional six projects will be appearing on the site, though the most popular category will be removed. Lets take a look at these upcoming projects.

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A few days ago I finished my third party contract. As has been an unfortunate trend, this project had absolutely nothing to do with either Blazing Games or with games. I suppose that as the work was not game related, hiring a company called Blazing Games to work on your project does not make sense, though hiring an individual does. This does mean that I am between contracts at the moment, so if any of my dozen or so readers know someone who needs programming (C, C++, Java, Flash or even assembly language) send them over to Blazing Games and tell them that I also do non-game related work. What does any of this have to do with my April 1st overhaul? Actually, a lot...

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The final vote on the Coming Soon page at BlazingGames.com is now over. The results of that vote are on that page. As I explained on that page, I am still going to be putting in 10 hours a week (at least) on Open Source projects. I will also be letting visitors to the BlazingGames site have a say in which projects will be worked on. How this will be done will be a bit different, as will the Blazing Games site after April 1st. What exactly will be happening? Obviously I am not going to spoil the surprise, but this week and next week's blog post will provide some ideas as to what will be happening.

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Well, I didn't quite finish Dungeon Romp in time, though I came really close and would have succeeded if it wasn't for those darn walls. More on that later, though. Coffee Quest fans will be proud to know that I finally posted some (the tip of the ice burg, actually) of the code I have been working on for that game. In particular, I posted my testing framework. The skill system should finally be ready for posting once I finish writing the test for it (assuming it passes the tests) and then the entity and entity factory classes will rapidly follow. That work will not be this week, as Fleet has won this week's vote. This is probably for the best as the coming soon vote this week will be the last one! See the coming soon page on BlazingGames.com for details.

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I owe Coffee Quest fans a few more hours as I have been busy this week and didn't get as much time in as I planned. This time will be made up Friday or Saturday as today through Thursday will be a race to get Dungeon Romp finished for release on BlazingGames.com this week. I am not going to say what will be released if I fail, but lets just say that even though Classic Dungeon Romp is text only, it is probably the better game by a long shot (and when people actually play modern dungeon romp, they will discover this. Too bad so few people will bother with the classic version). Still, with the poll results out of the way, it is time for a rant. This time it is about the Wii Remote.

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Picture Puzzle is coming along but I am not quite ready to post anything yet. Going by the lone vote it received (the other vote was from me, as I give every item a vote each week) it will be a while before another burst of activity happens as a result of winning the vote. However, as my current contract work is almost done and I will probably be between contracts for a while, I may work on this game in my own time if only to release on the Blazing Games site. The new version is actually going to combine all three puzzle games into one flash applet. Yes, it is being ported to Flash 9. This week's winner is Coffee Quest Before 4. Meaning that next week is going to be a vote race between Dungeon Romp and Fleet, as both of them are too far ahead of CQb4 (which gets between 20-30 votes a week). If you are a role-playing fan I would recommend voting for Dungeon Romp instead of CQb4 so that it can beat out Fleet. Likewise, the occasional picture puzzle and dart fans should think about voting for fleet. This is just a suggestion, which will probably not be heard by voters as not too many people read this blog anyway.

Today's entry reminds me of an old joke. A pilot tells his passengers, "I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you will be hitting the town early. The bad news is that you will be hitting the town." Well, Coffee Quest fans, I have some good news and some bad news. Before we get to the news, though, I will point out that this week's winner on the Blazing Games coming soon poll is Picture Puzzle 2. The next few weeks should be interesting as the non-story games have all built up good numbers so the polls could go any direction. In fact, if the non-story fans started taking advantage of the one vote a day policy that the coffee quest fans are taking advantage of, things could change quite dramatically.

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First, for those of you playing the Valentine Heart game on the BlazingGames.com site, I would like to address the problem I re-discovered with the game. The game uses the enter frame function to handle the movement of all the game sprites. While this in itself is not a problem, if the flash player is not able to keep up, frames get skipped. This has no effect on the game other than the fact that the movement for that frame is also skipped, meaning that the frame slows down. No big deal, except that the game is timed. This means that slower machines will have a disadvantage as the game will take longer to complete. I have encountered this problem before so should have been aware of it, but quite simply was in a rush to get the game out and forgot.

The preliminary version of the dungeon generator for Dungeon Romp has been posted on the ultimate retro project repository (https://ultimateretroproject.dev.java.net/) but there is still a lot to do yet. This week's vote winner on the Blazing Games coming soon page was Coffee Quest Before 4. The area of that game that I am working on is a longer way from being posted than I had hoped, so I may work on a different section of that game just so that I have something to post or I may come up with a better solution to the problem I am having that won't take as much work. I'll let you know next week. Table games are my final category in my plans summary. To get to these in the 2007 plans game, simply guess correctly on the coin toss.

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