Phil Peron Flash Platform Developer and Game Development Hobbyist

S’troidz!: Week 7 Update

Week 7 is here! This has been the most difficult week so far. Trying to juggle family, work and S’troidz! proved to be difficult and thus, S’troidz! had to suffer. The good news is that it wasn’t totally unproductive. I managed to implement the majority of code needed for the final alien type and that alone represents a pretty important milestone on the horizon: The completion of all major game objects!

Sure, there are plenty of other things that need to be done. In fact, I have well over 50 items on my list. Some of the secondary items include, music, sound effects, art and menus. None of them have a direct impact on gameplay but they’re important in that I can’t (or shouldn’t really) publish without them.

This leads me to something I thought a lot about when I wasn’t coding my game. Quality. I may not be able to work on this as much as I’d like, but I certainly won’t push anything out too soon just for the sake of getting it done. That would cheapen my efforts and my time spent building this simple, little game is much too precious for that. If I can’t release this and be proud of it, I won’t release it at all.

In keeping with the theme of quality, I want to mention a few things that distracted me (in a good way) from writing code for S’troidz. These are folks that I have a massive amount of respect for and whether they realize it or not, continue to inspire and motivate me.

The guys at Gaming Your Way rock. They just released an incredible Asteroids-style shooter called, CronusX. This game is extremely well polished and really raises the bar on my favorite flash game genre… shooters.

Richard Davey’s site, PhotonStorm has been one of my favorites for a long time. Richard along with Christian Corti released Flod, a module (.mod) replay library. This is a huge accomplishment. To get an idea of how this can effect the flash game movement, I was able to insert a five minute song with only an additional 130KB added to the file size. Yeah. 130. [pause for applause]

Ben Garney is the man. Or borg. I’m not certain as I have reason to believe he never really sleeps. Besides guiding development of PushButton Engine, working on Grunts (PBLabs WiP), tearing up the forums and staying in touch with people on IRC he managed to start a video series that offer quicktalks covering a wide range of features available with PBE.

Finally, I have to mention Danc from The Lost Garden. He recently published part 2 of his “Flash Love Letter” series and it really is a must-read for anyone interested in flash game development.

There are many others I’d like to add but these are the folks who really charged me up over this past week when I was pretty bummed I couldn’t fit more quality into S’troidz!

OK, here we go…

S’troidz! r7 Changelog

• Started implementation of final alien type.
• Extended powerup duration. Enjoy the carnage.

The next two weeks are jammed full of work and familial obligations. Therefore I won’t be doing much (or any) coding on S’troidz! I will however be leisurely exploring sound effects and art in an effort to hone in on what this thing should look and sound like.

Thanks for stopping by!