Okay so think is about time to write something about Chain of Fire. It’s almost done so there’s lots to say.

The Story:

So one day I decided to take a break from ATMC and make a flame effect. I wanted it to work almost like a filter. Where I could just apply it to a MovieClip and no matter what the shape of the mc. it would look like it were on fire. So I wrote up a quick demo in AS 1.0 and it looked great and it was actually pretty easy to get it to look right.

Now, for testing purposes, I had made a really quick run-cycle animation. And when I saw it on fire… it just looked so funny. Then the ideas start to bounce around in my mind and before I knew it, Chain of Fire was born.

Progress:

Originally it was only going to be a quick one-week game but once I had fully developed the concept it was obvious that it would be a much bigger project. Giving it level designs instead blank maps with harder goals each level, increases the amount of work exponentially. To fix this, I handed the job off to my brother who is good at that stuff. Problem is he doesn’t really communicate with me… at all. Like I’ll send him an email and he won’t see it for like a week. On top of that, he only has Flash MX 2004, so I had to make special versions of the level editor and the game engine so that he could make levels and test them.

Another set back was the fire effect. Yes it was easy to get it to look right, but optimization was a huge problem. Having more than ten burning guy’s on screen at once took the frame rate from 40 fps to 20. That was completely unacceptable. But in the end, I spent more hours trying different optimizations than anything else. To get it right I had to do something completely weird, but it works. Now I can have as many guys burning as I want.

So right now Chain of Fire is on flashgamelicense.com sans levels and the fire effect optimization. People are saying that it needs objectives like every other chain reaction game so I’m going to put that in along with a ‘free-play’ mode where you can just play whatever level you want and just have fun.

Alright so now I’m all caught up on Chain of Fire. A lot happened that I didn’t write. I sort of wish I’d been writing since the beginning but whatever.

Later.