I was also working on an entrance portfolio for the world famous animation program at Sheridan College.

Anyways, Flash game wise, I decided to take ATMC under my wing and give it a second shot.  I started rebuiling the game from the bottom up in AS3, but then I came across an amazing contest.  Basically you submit an idea for a Batman game (Batman: Brave and the Bold). They pick the 10 best ideas and green light them to go and make the game.  Then when all the games are done they pick the best one.   The top prize is $9k plus a $15k contract to make a second game.

A chance to work for the Batman?!  I can’t pass it up.  Winning this contest would be like a dream.

So I’ve now watched all the episodes of Batman: Brave and the Bold and I’m brainstorming ideas.

I’m totally psyched.

Anyways that’s what I’ve been up to.

Later.

Check out the “Mike’s Old Stuff” link on the Games page or click here.

Have fun!

Later

*Jan 29  EDIT*

Chain of Fire has been realeased early!

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.

1) ATMC- about 80% complete. Progress has completely stopped on this one. Why? That’s something for another post…

2) Chain of Fire - This one’s about 50% complete. I can’t put an accurate percent on that because my bro is designing the levels and he doesn’t really communicate with me at all… But most of the stuff on my end is done. I’ll write more about this game in another post.

3) Ball Balance - This one is 100% complete and will be released tomorrow. More of an experiment really.

Those are my games. From now on I will post updates on individual games.

That’s it for now. Peace,

asagoPAN