It is currently at rank 38 in Family Games and rank 68 in Puzzle Games. It’s holding well at 4.5+ stars with 26 ratings and 20 written reviews.

Go buy it! It’s awesome!

This time with an iPhone and iPod Touch Game!

In Rotix, you tap on the gears to spin the colored tiles around them. Match the tiles with the guide and win! The gameplay is so intuitive that it takes a new player seconds to grasp and play. However, there is so much depth that you will be discovering new ways to solve each puzzle everytime you play.

Check out the game video and more at ROTIX.

BUY IT NOW FOR $0.99 at: ITUNES LINK

If you buy it, don’t forget to let me know what you think by writing a review!

ZunderFury is complete and live!

It uses roughly the same engine as OrbBlaster, but with bitmap rendering instead of vector for much better performance when displaying hundreds of enemies. The shmup gameplay is more traditional, and straightforward.

ZunderFury features an upgrade system after many players mentioned that they would’ve enjoyed upgrading in OrbBlaster. There is also an achievement system for those who would like to take on different challenges beside reaching the highest score.

There are two different ship types each with its own unique weapon, so be sure to try out both. As always, please contact me or leave a comment below if you have any suggestion, comment, or bug to report!

Happy blasting!

The general idea is to set up a Loader object in your preloader SWF, and make it execute 2 functions: an update function, and a finish function. The update function is called every time load progress is made, and the finish function is called when loading is done. You would accomplish this through Event Listeners as follows:

var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest("Content.swf");
var loader:Loader = new Loader();

loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, loadProgress);
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loadComplete);

What you do inside those functions is totally up to you. If you have a loading animation that animates relatively to the progress (like a cup filling up), then you would update that animation inside the loadProgress function. But as an example, we’ll be updating a percent counter as the load progresses.

function loadProgress(event:ProgressEvent):void 
{
    var percentLoaded:Number = event.bytesLoaded / event.bytesTotal;
    percentLoaded = Math.round(percentLoaded * 100);
	
    this.percentLoaded.text = String(uint(percentLoaded)) + "%";
}

function loadComplete(event:Event):void 
{
    trace("Load Complete");
}

To wrap it all up, we call load on the URL request, and add the Loader object to the preloader’s Display List, so that the content shows up when it’s done loading.

loader.load(request);
this.addChild(loader);

Also, make sure that the preloader’s dimension and frame rate settings are the same as the main content’s.

Here are the source files with the external preloader, and a test content SWF.

External Preloader

Test content SWF

To do this, I add an Event Listener to the music channel that will call a function to replay the sound whenever it’s done playing once.

public function playMusic():void
{
    musicChannel = music.play(); 
    musicChannel.addEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopMusic);
}

public function loopMusic(e:Event):void
{
    if (musicChannel != null)
    {
        musicChannel.removeEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopBackgroundMusic);
	playMusic();
    }
}

So the sound will continue to loop forever until I stop it. Whenever I do, I have to remove the Event Listener from the music channel or else it won’t be garbage collected.

public static function stopMusic():void
{
    if (musicChannel != null)
    {
	musicChannel.stop();
	musicChannel.removeEventListener(Event.SOUND_COMPLETE, loopMusic);
    }
}

That’s about it. A pretty simple solution to an annoying problem sometimes.

If you’ve made a Flash game with a PHP high score table without any security before, you’ve probably found some unpossible scores sitting on top of your chart when you wake up one morning. Well, in this tutorial, we’ll see how to implement a simple encryption system that is relatively secure for Actionscript 3.0. It’s not perfectly secure, but it will fend off your usual score cheater. This tutorial also assumes that you know the basics of implementing a high score system in Flash and PHP. If you don’t, please check out this tutorial.

The basic concept of this method is to use MD5 to hash the submission data with a key. Then we send the data, along with the MD5 hash to the PHP script. The PHP script takes the data, and hashes it with the same key. If the two hashes match, then we know it’s legit.

First, let’s go over what to do on the Flash side of things. We will need an encryption API capable of MD5 for AS3, such as this encryption package by Geoffrey Williams. There are others which can be found by Googling, but this one is pretty simple to use.

Suppose we want to submit the player’s name and score, we construct a string of those values:

var playerData:String = playerName + playerScore;

Then we use the MD5 package to hash it with a key, which is a secret string that we make up. Assuming we are using the package shown above, the code would look something like this:

var key:String = "HASH_KEY";
var hashData:String = MD5.hex_hmac_md5(key, playerData);

After we have this, we just send both the playerData and hashData to our PHP score submission script using a POST method.

Over on the PHP script, we take the playerData, and run it through MD5 with the same secret key that we used in Flash. If the result matches the hashData that we received from Flash, then it’s a valid score submission. The operative PHP functions here are bin2hex and mhash.

$key = "HASH_KEY";
$result = bin2hex(mhash(MHASH_MD5, $playerData, $key));
if ($result == $hashData)
{
    //record submission
}

Thats all there is to this encryption method. You’ve probably noticed, but the one flaw to this method is that if the hacker has access to the Flash source, then he can find out the secret key and beat the system. Fortunately, as far as I know, there are no public AS3 decompilers yet. Should one appear, we’d have to use obfuscation to hide the key or use some sort of SWF encryption program such as Amayeta. Nonetheless this method should keep most casual cheaters off your back.

One of the more common questions in flash game development is where to get free sounds or music.

Probably the best free sound archive I know of is Soundsnap. They have tons of sounds effects, sound loops, and music samples. And they’re all free to use in your games!

You can find almost any sound there, and if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for, you can use Audacity to the modify the sounds until you get what you want. The program is open source and ultra easy to use. I get particularly good results from mixing together a couple of similar sounds to get a richer sound effect. But be careful not to mix too many or else it’ll sound disorganized.

As for a free music site, I don’t know of an all-encompassing site like Soundsnap but I do like opsound. They have a good selection of nice music there. The songs are covered under the Creative Commons License so it’s best to to ask for permission before using it in a commercial game. Most artists will be happy to be featured in a wide release game so it shouldn’t be a problem to ask.

So far, OrbBlaster’s garnered pretty positive reviews, managing to make front page on Newgrounds. It’s doing okay on Kongregate, which I think is because it doesn’t have any badges or achievements tie-ins for the site. Kongregate players love the achievements so I might have to implement some sort of it.

Spreading the SWF is a great way to reach other players, but I probably should have put a more visible link to doogog.com. Currently, it’s inside of the Credits button, which seems like not many people check out.

I also submitted my site to the Yahoo and Google directories, and am going to try linkdumps, too.

Before I completed OrbBlaster, I figured I needed a good looking site to present it. So my brother over at phuson.com designed and set up the site for me. Then how would people know to visit my site? Well, I’ve been submitting the link to flash/web gaming blog sites such as jayisgames and thegameslist.

The best case scenario is that those blog sites enjoy the game, and make a post about it like Mark Hurst over at goodexperience. OrbBlaster was also featured over at Jonas’ blog at wearegame. So far, the link made its way to European sites somehow, and I’ve been getting a lot of hits from ollo. Awesomes!

I realized I didn’t know that many other flash gaming blog sites, but I’ll probably find more as I dig around. If you have tips or other gaming blog sites I could submit to, please leave a comment about it or contact me!

The game was created with Flash CS3 and Actionscript 3.0, and took a bit over 2 months of core work. Although I did take a couple of weeks before that to ramp up to AS3.

The hardest part of the process was probably coming up with a cohesive style and feel as well the theme for the gameplay.
My drawing skills aren’t the greatest, so I had to pick a simple style yet still pleasing to the eye. At one point, I was going to go with shooting floating jello happy faces. But that turned out too weird.

I’ve got a couple of games in the pipeline. The one I’m currently working full time on is a more traditional shmup where you can move around, but with a bit of Gauntlet and RPG elements mixed into it. Should be done in a month or so.

Then the game after that is a deeper strategy, RPGish, team arena game. It’s a larger project and one I’ve been looking forward to work on for past couple of years. Hopefully, I’ll have gained enough experience and skills to implement it properly.

I keep hearing about how finishing the game is only half the work, and promoting it is the other half. Well, it looks to be pretty true. In the next couple of posts I’ll talk about my experience in promoting my site and spreading the game.