FIGHT! no wait, it’s “GO!” is it? “Kick each other’s @ss!”, I don’t really know how its translated, but I know what it means. It’s an order to do your best and take out your opponent. And it’s the name we chose for our game, and we are happy with it.
So without further due, here is the logo for it and some combat screenshots.
Keep in mind though, the backgrounds need some work still! No time for everything!
So, here they are, in full glory, the first peak into the combats in Hajime.
Take care!
Marco
Hi everyone, just a quick note to let you know of some stuff going on regarding Bold Pixel Engine.
Collaboration with Arne G. Strout
It really felt great to hear about a developer wanting to build on BPE to make it go further. That’s what I felt when I read Arne G. Strout blog post about BPE. Under the spirit of open-source, Arne offered a great deal of thought and ideas regarding our little framework.
In the meantime, v2 was already under way so we exchanged some ideas and I’m pleased to announce that Arne will be collaborating in v2 development.
Box2D integration…
Wrapping Box2D in a minimalist Bold Pixel Engine kind of package is no easy treat, but it’s done. It doesn’t offer the full potential of Box2D yet and it’s not integrated with blit, but it will and it’s working great.
Toolkit changes
Manager has been removed from the toolkit package and it is now the manager of all the engine. Again this is related to a minimalist approach. Box2D wrapping needed information about framerate and we could get it from the main movieclip that is passed to the manager. This also offers other possibilities like controlling mouse focus, quality, yada yada yada.
I’m cooking a Button manager. I know most developers don’t really like SimpleButtons, but I actually do! What I was lacking was a central point to control those… it’s being taken care of. 
Scene and Music will now have transitions. This is possible mostly due to Greensock tweening library, which Vortix Games now officially supports by becoming a member of the Club Greensock.
And that’s it!
There won’t be many news in the next weeks, since we have a lot of work (remember that we kinda disappear when we are just starting up a contract project) and the rest of the bunch, like the Japan game, Bold Pixel Engine and so on.
Hi
Almost two years ago, I went through the trouble of using some trials of encryption/obfuscation software in order to protect our swf files. I don’t know how that worked out for you, but to me it didn’t work at all.
I tried and retried and tried again. I messed around with several settings and it never, NEVER worked perfectly… or actually it did if I turned out most if not all useful stuff.
Well… I really put it behind my back and never really thought about it again. But today I tried it again… and it worked… and it worked nicely!
So this is good news and since it went so nicely I’ll be making a small series of posts with our findings, from initial testing to a final game. Stay tuned.
I’m cleaning up my brain today. It has been cluttered with code and projects and today after almost six months I’ve managed to stop and think. At first my objective was to code but while I was pulling some design decisions I noticed I was also organizing my own brain.
Projects
We are now in the final ‘meters’ of a long race. This race was a nice and big contract project we are just just just about done with. As it is approaching the end we have more opportunities in front of us.
Less than a week ago all we had was this current project, the japanese themed game being coded by Pedro that Marco has spoke about lately and Mechs and Drones in a full stop. It was only natural that our option would be to pick up where Mechs and Drones was left, but suddenly another possible contract landed on our hands and the doubts start.
We’ve passed the startup phase with no investment capital but our own work, which is a huge victory. I wonder what we could have done with venture capital… We are currently in the consolidation stage, so these crossroads are always a doubt. Go for the stability of the project or the chance of a game like Mechs and Drones?
Bold Pixel Engine
A lot of stuff planned for v2. We’re implementing Box2D in it, plus camera and more and more behaviors. We will migrate all time based stuff to Greensock’s Tween Platform.
With this a lot of questions appear also…
Will the engine stay modular? By this I mean, right now I’m not dependent of the blit engine, but to implement Box2D I have to decide if only the blit engine will be served by the physics wrapper. I want to write a simple collision system. Should I implement it with sensors in Box2D? Or create a separate one?
I can even go backwards… should the current animation of the blit engine be able to be applied to MovieClips? And the list could go on and on…
I know what will decide all this: simplicity and minimalism. Whatever makes Bold Pixel Engine be more simple and minimalist will probably be chosen.
Sorting it out
Monday marks the beginning of March. I’m betting it will be a defining month for us this year. For starters the japan game will walk the extra mile in terms of content, quality and so on. Then, depending on what we will be doing, a lot of extra effort is needed… that’s what I think right now. We’ll see how it goes.
By the way… thanks for reading
Rant mode on…
Saying you believe in your own potential and in the quality of what you do or create is a huge measure of your own success and value. The rest is proving it. This is true when you want to improve everyday of your professional life and it is damn difficult to prove it. Bottom line is that no one takes your word for it, you have to prove it by showing your potential and quality, therefor your success and value.
Nothing is more a reflection of this than it’s exact opposite. If you say you don’t believe your own quality and potential people around you will take that for granted! No one needs prove of the lack of value, quality or success of someone that says it! Everyone will take your word for it!
Now transpose this to a reality where money is involved, let’s say, for some reason, I’m talking about the flash game market reality. The portals want to buy content at the lowest possible cost, which is only natural. The developers want to sell that content for the highest possible margin.
Portals do their best to have a professional behavior. Portals excel at saying they are good and to prove it. Obviously if it’s proven, we all know they are or at least they do their best to be.
But I just read that developers are not professionals said by a developer and the context of this is unprofessional behavior. What I read (and it’s just my opinion) is that the developers as a whole have a low potential, low quality and that they do it for the love of games. A developer said it… no need to prove it.
Even if one developer thinks that his unprofessional behavior won’t affect him because he is not a professional, it will, hard but I’m not worried at all. What worries me is that it is extended to the whole flash developers present in that community as if it was cool not to be professional. The value of the whole community will lower if that mentality spreads, thus lowering the potential for margin. Professional developers will do their best to prove they are not part of the pack, and probably will manage to do so, but the idea that actions don’t affect hobbyist developers will at least affect all hobbyist developers, some of them amazingly talented.
Rant mode off…
