Warm toilet seats at the Centro Forum, Camden

I have a  memory of reading 'Boy', by Roald Dahl and there being a practise in in the posh boarding school he went to of the younger boys being forced to sit on the toilet seats to warm them up for the old boys. Well that's not needed here at the Centro Forum, part of the Centro Buldings group in Camden.

I really like the company I'm working for at the moment. The people are great and the work is interesting, even if it is AS2 (in 2012, I know!). However the office building is nothing short of a disgrace. Five floors with one incredibly slow lift that break down with worrying frequency. Four of those floors are occupied by tech companies, including the one I'm working for now. There are four toilets, 2 for the men, 2 for the very few women (fun fact, the room I'm in has about 40 mens and no women. tech companies, ya know), with 2 cubicles in each men's plus urinals.

The toilets have always been fairly inadequate and squalid, and it was a frequent occurrence to have to wait in the dingy, cramp toilets for a cubicle to become free. This became even worse earlier this year as there were a string of plumbing problems, leading to overflows, blocked and overflowing toilets and more queues.

I'm guessing, largely due to this the management started on refurbishing the toilets at the beginning of July. They closed one of the mens and one of the womens and began ripping them up, leaving only one toilet apiece for each sex. Cue queues.

Cue waiting outside the cubicle in July heat for someone to finish because you know that coming back later is pointless and it will be exactly the same. Cue coming in to sweaty, warm toilet seats and bundles of hand towels overspilling the bin because of the sheer amount of people using a toilet meant for a fraction usage. You even had people talking about going to the gym or  a restaurant at lunch because they need a shit.

This was supposed to last two week, then they would start on the other toilets. Instead it took them over a month.

They opened the new toilets at the start of August, and yes, they're much nicer. Dyson airblade dryer (there's something very amusing about watching people who don't know how to use these try to try their hands), huge extractor fans and a lighter decor. Yes, they did have a leak that closed them for a day almost immediately but that just seemed par for the course.

We're all now praying there won't be further breakdowns because they've close the other set of toilets to redo them. The new ones are being used almost continuously and there permanently someone stationed out the cubicles waiting to get in. The new toilet is more pleasant as a place to stand a read the web on your mobile while you wait but I don't think this is how it's meant to be.

The sad thing is that even when the other toilet is finished, and even if they've fixed the plumbing issue, the toilets will still be sadly inadequate for the numbers who work here, and the lift will need replacing at some point. this building just isn't fit for purpose.

Who's turn is it anyway?

I'm building a reasonably traditional Roguelike so it's going to be turn based. That sounds straightforward but there are different ways that turn based can go.

Different models

Player then mobs

This is probably the easiest way to go. The player takes their turn, be it movement or action, then the mobs or npcs take their turn.

Pros

• This has the huge advantage that it's very straight forward for the player and easy to keep track of.
• It makes AI pathfinding easier since the mobs always know where the player is when they move.
• It gives the player an advantage over the mobs, since if they player can kill the mob in his turn, the mob won't have a turn to react, because it will be dead.

Cons

• Difficult to simulate different speed of movement or attack, since it's very binary. Adding extra actions in a turn is hugely powerful and potentially game changing, as Baldur's gate/Icewind Dale players will remember when their fighters got multiple attacks per round.
• If the player moves next to a mob one square away, since it's the mobs turn next the player will be attack with no chance to defend. This happens in Dredmor and it's very annoying. If a mob is one square away I find myself hitting space to wait a turn and let the mob come to me, which feels like cheesing.

Movement then action

First everyone moves, then they perform their actions.

Pros

• Again fairly straightforward for the player.
• Feels fairer than players then mobs.

Cons

• Again can't simulate different speeds easily.
• Slightly more complicated. Mobs don't where the player will be until he moves, so needs some logic. Ditto for players chasing a fleeing mob.
• Possible for a character to make and action and die on the same turn.

Character speed based

The best example of this kind of system would probably be Final Fantasy. Imagine each character has an individual timer, and they can only perform and action when that timer finishes, then with each action it resets. Different characters have slower or faster timers to make different characters feel faster or slower.

Pros

• The most flexible and the most 'realistic'. It means that you can have faster characters moving faster and attacking more often.
• More avenues to build your character in different ways. Do you want a fast character and to use a kiting strategy or maybe a slow attack speed high damage build.
• You could have different actions take different amounts of time, which could be part of their balance. For example spell which take longer to cast but are much more powerful.
• Actually could be easier for pathfinding since instead of everyone moving at the same time there is a definite list of who moves when and only one character will move at a time.

Cons

• A bit more difficult to understand for newer players, and even for for seasoned player might be more difficult to plan around. This could maybe be compensated for by having most characters in similar attack speed at the start and to ease the players into the concept.
• Much more complex to implement, especially with many different mobs, all with potentially different speeds.
• Balancing would be more difficult as speed is just another factor to consider. I dislike how in any turn based game with haste, haste always becomes the number one must have spell.
• It slightly breaks the whole turn based thing. If a player can take more than one action a turn is each action a turn? What should I call it? What if I want to make a scoring element turn based?

My intentions

I would love to do the speed based. It just opens up so many different options for builds and abilities. I'm just worried that it's another layer of complexity on top of what is already a very complex project.

In the end I'm going to experiment with the movement then actions model, which feels nicer to me than player then mob. I'll see if I can get it to work well, then if I get problems I can fall back on the player then mob model.

Features and creep

Given my time and resource limitations I’m going to have to try to be strict with myself as to what I’m trying to accomplish and what features I’m going to try to include.

One of the reasons my previous attempt at a roguelike stalled early on was because I tried to do too much. I was trying (and failing) to play Adom and I was really impressed by the open world feel of it, so also influenced by games like Baldur’s gate and Morrowind I tried to make an open world/dungeon crawling sandbox. Cue lots of bloated design documents and a model/data object directory with over one hundred different objects. It’s didn’t go very far.

To avoid this fate I’m going to try to keep a tight rein on the list of features I can support.

This is a list of some of the features I want to include in the game.

• An easy to use, casual friendly interface. Gameplay should also be simple enough, at least initially for players who have never played a roguelike to understand and enjoy the game. This is the number one, non-negotiable feature.
• A tutorial to get new users into the game.
• No open world. It will be a pure dungeon crawling game, though I would like there to be some route branching.
• Levels will be randomly generated, but I want to use several different methods to give different levels different feels.
• Traps, chests, teleporters, switches, keys.
• Auto explore. This could be a biggy, but I believe it will make a huge difference, especially in a mobile game.
• Multiple different play styles and build paths possible, even if they’re just variations on the standard rogue/wizard/warrior builds.
• Abilities that can reposition or add status effects to characters, to add tactical choice.
• Card based abilities/stat system.
• Tile based art. I’m thinking more DCSS than dredmor. I don’t have the time/funds to have animation but it has to be more immediate and intuitive than asci.
• Cool items and equipment with different stats and abilities that make the players make a choice – no best items. Also some abilities target tiles with traps/status effect/dots etc. 
• Only basic potions and scrolls – mostly ‘oh shit’ crutches.
• Enough different monsters to be interesting and varied.
• Monsters that don't either just come up to you and hit you, or stand back and shoot you.
• Different damage types, with corresponding resistances and themes.
• Must have some pathfinding, since it will be in effect mouse controlled.
• Some kind of online scoreboard system.
• No religions/races etc - another thing to balance and I'm already so low on time.
• No crafting.
• I would love to have multiple languages, so I'm going to try to build it in a way that would make this possible at some point without too much pain. I'm not planning on have more than English in my initial build though.

Actually, looking at all this, I'm clearly crazy. I probably can spend 2-3 months on this full time before I'm going to have to start whoring myself out for freelance work, and this is a list that I wouldn't feel comfortable promising a client given double that time. When you add to the fact that I haven't done much mobile work before and time for testing/balancing etc I'm going to have to cut this all down drastically.

I think what I'll do it carry on with my spare time planning and groundwork so that when my contract finishes and I start on it full time I have a running start, then see how I'm doing 4-6 weeks in. Then I can make some difficult choices and try cut it down to something I can actually finish. 

I hope.

What kind of Roguelike am I trying to make?

And who is my target audience?

In my 'what is a Roguelike?' post I briefly wrote about the different types of Roguelikes there are. More or less I am aiming to make a fairly traditional Roguelike. A turn based dungeon crawling rpg with experience and character progression.

In terms of how hardcore and complicated it is my decision was probably made as soon as I decided I wanted to make it easily portable to mobile. Making a game playable on mobile means no keyboard commands and much smaller screen space for information, feedback and controls. This means for it to function the game needs to be relatively simple, and that pretty much rules out a super-complex hardcore Roguelike, which to be honest is probably a good thing anyway since I don't think I would have the time or resources to build something like that anyway.

This all lead to the fact that I'm looking to make a decidedly casual Roguelike. By this I don't mean something dumb or with no depth - it's definitely got to have more to it than your standard bump to attack 7 day rogue. I just mean that you have to be able to play it without reading a manual, and all the stats and information you need to be able to understand it need to be accessible within one click, or two clicks if it's not core information.

I also want there to be more instant gratification, from items and increase in power, than in most Roguelikes. I want players to think 'Wow loot!' and 'Ding!, level up!' and for it to be exciting and really cool, something that doesn't happen so much in a lot of traditional Roguelikes, which tend to have flatter power progression. This is great for getting people initially hooked on your game but could have implications later on for the longevity of the game. We'll see how it goes.

So, the answer is that I'm making a casual, small to mideium size, high power curve Roguelike without the complex systems seen in many games, and with a simple, easy to use interface.

This will almost certainly alienate some hardcore players who are looking for something deeper, but the success of casual Roguelikes like Dredmor, 100 Rogues and Cardinal Quest show that there are enough casual players to make up for it. As long as you make something good.

The answer to who my target audience is, is someone who enjoys classic Roguelikes but who sometimes finds them often overly obscure and difficult to play. Someone who loves games like BG, FF and Diablo, plus fast paced combat and strategy focused games like League of Legends and DOTA. Basically, my target audience is me, and if I can make a game that I enjoy I'll be happy, and I'm sure lots of other people will enjoy it too.

Why I'm doing it in Flash

I'm planning on creating the whole game using Adobe Flash, with the mobile versions being publish with Air. I may even do a downloadable desktop version, also using air.

I would be lying if I didn't admit that a major reason I'm using Flash is because I'm a professional Flash developer, so AS3 is a language I'm completely comfortable with. I know that I can build complex engines with it and I know it can take it.

The other reason is that I'm using Flash, and a reason why I personally think Flash it one of the best choices for building apps, is that I can produce an android, ios, web and desktop version with the same unified codebase. I'll obviously have to do some different UIs for the mobile vs the normal size version, but hopefully nothing too onerous as long as I enforce some strict apis. For me this is a huge deal. Even if I spent the time learning objective C or java, like lots of people have suggested I should 'for when Flash dies' there's no way I'd be able to do multiple versions in different languages. Flash means that for the main game elements I can develop for the flash version then just rebuild the other version without having to worry about getting all the changes carried over, because there will only be one codebase.

The only thing that remotely worries me about doing the game in Flash is the saving the game aspect. In theory it should be easy - I can use sharedObject, which should be able to save whole complex data objects. In practise in a previous project I've found sharedObject to not be %100 reliable. I managed to fix that issue by converting everything to primitive data type before the save, then back again, but it's not something I want to do if I can help it, and I'm hoping the issue has been fixed (it was infrequent enough it may have just been one flash player build.)

I briefly toyed with the idea of learning, then doing the it using HaXeNME, but in the end I decided I'm probably already biting off more than I can chew, so best not compound it by adding in a new language, especially one that's so niche and new. If I run into problems I'd be worried about finding answered, and anyway I don't see myself getting more work on the basis of knowing it.

Why am I writing this blog?

4 main reasons:

To solidify my thoughts.

I’m having trouble ironing out some of my systems/ideas and putting them down in blog posts is a way of getting them in order and to sort them out without actually having to do the huge step of actually putting them into the game and making them work. I find it’s also good to just write down your reasoning for your decision to be able to look at them from afar. I find this is even more important if you’re looking at them from more than a week or so’s time difference.

Improve my communication skill.

I don’t do much writing and if I am genuine in my desire to move away from the Just A Programmer thing I do need to improve my ability to communicate. Writing more is a very good way to do this and I’m hoping I can clearly communicate what I’m trying to do and why I’m making the decisions I make.

Publicity

At the moment literally no one reads this blog. That’s cool. It’s not something I’ve put any time into and I don’t regard it as an avenue to get work or talk to clients. However if I am serious about trying to make an indie game and actually do something with it I need somewhere to talk about it and make announcements, etc. Once I decide on a name I’ll probably create a site, but it will link to this blog and this will be where the major info goes out. (unless at some point it’s not). I’m also going to have to start actually using my Twitter account, though I’m sceptical about whether I’ll have anything interesting to say.

I also think that if I’m even mildly successful there will be people interested in my creative process and thinking. One thing I’ve learnt is that no matter how bad your game is there will still be someone who thinks it’s amazing, gets obsessed and spends hours playing it. If this is you, ‘Hi!’.

To make it more difficult to quit, then skulk away

In a similar way that getting up in front of all your family and friends and proclaiming your love for someone makes it less likely you’ll split up when the going gets tough, I’m hoping writing a public account of what I’m doing will make it more difficult for me to just quit and go and do something else. This blog is like marrying my roguelike, even if to carry on the metaphor, at moment no one has shown up for my wedding and I’m going to have to pressgang/hire some people off of the street to be my witnesses.

What am I hoping to get out of it?

What I would love is that in the end I’ll have a great game that is good enough for me to be able to charge for on the app store/google play, and that will sell enough copies to justify me taking a few months out from contracting. I'd quite like to look into trying out some form of micro payments if I don't charge for the app, so some sale that way if I do this would be nice.


This may be unrealistic so I’d like at least to have a finished, decent game that works, and that I can put out on google play as a free download, and that it will interest a few people, and a flash version that will get some portal interest.

It’s important for me to get the mobile app version because this is an area I can see a lot of on-going growth, and an area I don’t have any experience in. I want something that I can show prospective clients that will make them think ‘this is someone who knows how to code and design for mobile’. The market for browser focused flash is still pretty good but the writing is on the wall and I realise I’m going to have to move onto something else. I've had a few recruiter ask for people with mobile experience, so hopefully getting some mobile stuff under my belt will help me get work. If I can see this through I'll definitely learn some new skills and get some better perspective on mobile/game design.

If it’s even mildly successful I’d like to leverage that to get more indie game work with less of the boring ‘pays the bill’ work I seem to end up doing so much work of these days. Maybe even some pure games design work. Wannabe games designer are 10 a penny, people with finished products under their belt are much rarer.

Why a roguelike?

Why am I making a Roguelike game, as opposed to some other type of game?

• I really like roguelikes. This in itself is halfway to being a good enough reason to do one. 
• I’ve wanted to do a roguelike for a long time. I have the beginnings of one that I started >5 years ago sitting on my computer so I don’ t have to start from scratch.
• As I said I want to do something that will work on a mobile and a roguelike is ideally suited to playing on a mobile device since it’s turn based and therefore can be paused/restarted at any point. Since having a baby I've become a big fan of games that you can turn off immediately without losing any progress.
• Roguelikes are generally very data/code heavy with minimal art and animation, and that means I can do most of it myself. I’m not bad at design and fairly decent at art but my core is the coding, and I’d like to think game design. This means I can concentrate on what I’m good at. I want to do it in Flash as an air for mobile app. Air seems to work pretty well even on low-mid range smart phones but it’s worth planning something that’s not going to be too graphically intensive.
• There are several big communities of people making Roguelikes, so there are lots of resources I can access for help and in some situation for actually code for specific problems.
• Roguelike have some really, really interesting decisions to make, and I have some of what I think are great and new ideas that I haven’t seen before in the genre. I think I have something to add.
• There's lots of things you need to do for a roguelike that have use in other game types, so it will be nice to get a version working and to understand them. I think I'll learn a lot! Examples: pathfinding, level generation, line fo sight, ai.

What is a roguelike?

Wikipedia says ‘The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by level randomization, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Most roguelikes feature ASCII graphics, with newer ones increasingly offering tile-based graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue.’

There are Roguelikes in many different genres, from fantasy to sci-fi to crime and realism, though fantasy is by far the most common. I toyed with the idea of doing a space marine themed game, but in the end decided on fantasy, largely because I want to make a big deal out of magic and that makes more sense in a fantasy setting. I was also told that there is a bigger audience for fantasy than for sci-fi games.

Frequently all it takes is for a game to have one or two aspects for people to call it a roguelike. I’ve heard Terraria, The Binding of Isaac and Diablo called roguelikes because they  feature randomly generated levels with at least the the option of permadeath. I guess this would mean that my really old (AS1!) game Doomed could be considered a Roguelike since it plays like a low rent version of binding of Isaac.

My game Doomed has randomly generated levels, character progression and one life.
It's a Roguelike!

For me the critical aspects are the randomized, tile based levels, the turn based gameplay, the character progression and the permanent death. I’m not going to have asci art, though my art will be functional and it’s got to be entirely mouse driven, since it has to go on mobile which has no keyboard.

My Roguelike indie project

I’m a flash developer with more than 10 years experience making web games and other rich web application type stuff. Previously I’ve been able to find time to create my own games in my spare time but in the last couple of years I’ve been too busy to do my own stuff, due to work/family commitment, plus also playing too many games when I do have free time.

This has meant that more and more I feel like I’m being defined by what I do for my job, and though I do get the occasional games project where I get to exercise some creativity I’m increasingly finding myself doing jobs where I am Just A Programmer. It’s kind of depressing, and also it leads onto more of the same dull technical work.

I know quite a few people who are doing indie games and it just seems much more interesting a fulfilling and long term I really, really want to move in that direction. I just need to find the time to do some of my own work and the mental toughness to turn down freelance work when it gets offered. As much as now may not be a good time, what with a new baby and the expense of living in London, I’m can't see when there ever will be a good time, short of winning the lottery, and I’ve been putting it off for years. I’m allowing myself to coast until my current contract finishes, trying to do some groundwork in my meagre spare time, then I’m hoping to take 1-2 months off to try to get something done, with more time allowed if what I’m doing is promising.

I’ve been weighing up which project to go forward with and I’ve decided to go with a Roguelike, specifically one tailored to mobile devices using Abode Air to publish it. I’m also planning on doing a cut down pure flash version for the web, mostly to try to drive traffic to the app versions.

Everything you wanted you know about semen but were afraid to ask.

Via: www.onlineschools.org

How to spot a hidden handgun

A useful skill for everyday life. I'm trying to work out in what context it's appropriate. A police/protection training course? Apparently it actually appeared in the New York Times.

I got the image from here, but make sure you click through to here for some more awesome info graphic by the same author.

Brylcreem Batting challenge

I did the dev work on this game for Brylcreem. The agency I worked for was Holler. It's a yeti sport stylee cricket game where you play as Kevin Pieterson. I have to confess that whilst I was making it I had grave misgivings about it but the end result turned out really well, largely due to some awesome desgin work by the guys at Holler. It's very addictive.

Also worth mentioning is the high scores. I played the game so many times I thought I would be unbeatable, but of course there are entries in the table that I couldn't even dream of. Oh well.

Link 

Periodic table of periodic tables

This is genius. You know all those lame periodic tables of (pokemon, heavy meta, etc.). This is a periodic table of periodic tables.

New Youtube AS3 API

That sound you hear is angels singing hallelujah whilst beams of light shine down upon our unworthy faces. Youtube have finally released an AS3 version of their chromeless API:

http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/flash_api_reference.html

If only they'd have released it 2 months ago.

Initially it's fantastic and really easy to use. The code example works, you can monitor and change the video quality and it's fairly smooth. Then the record scratches and you run into some problems.

Firstly the destroy(() function hasn't been implemented yet. At first glance this was a deal breaker, but someone else suggested using a hack and just requesting a non-existent video, which stops the stream. player.loadVideoById("Youtube are jokers") works well, though if I was building an app that was showing lots and lots of different video (the one I'm on will probably only have 5-10 max) I would be concerned.

Also the embed code coming from it doesn't work. This is less serious (I was very tempted to just leave it and hope no one noticed until Youtube fixed it) but I'm still not sure how to find a nice workaround. I might have to just write a function that manually assembles the code. Not optimal but it will probably work.

Ripples

I've just released a new game, Ripples . I'm going for a chilled, atmospheric version of Every Extend. Lots of BevelFilter and some dodgy focalLength fake 3d hacked to bits. The premise and gameplay is purely derivitive but I thing the music, look and feel make up for it.

I'm releasing it as self sponsored to try to drive traffic to my site. We'll see how that goes. What I really need to do it write some script to catch how many people actually click the 'play more game' button. We'll see how it goes.

More Flash youtube fun

This time using the Javascript wrapper for the player.

This works pretty well, though flex debugger seems to sometimes interfere and break it, making it a bit of a challenge to develop.

As it seems it has to be the case with youtube it mostly works, but not totally, the problem here being with the error handling. According to the documentation it should dispatch an event when the youtube video is either not found or is not available for embedding. It didn’t. After doing some checking and verifying that it wasn’t my code I opened up YoutubeLoader.as and found that there was nothing in there to handle any errors coming from the javascript. I then checked the javascript and found that there was also nothing in there to send or receive error messages from the as2 youtube player you’ve loaded in.

Simples, I think. I amended the javascript to catch the errors from the as2 player, then added in code in YoutubeLoader.as to catch the externalInterface calls. Feeling very smug I tested it out. I found that youtube are bollocks. A working youTube video always dispatches a 100 error, right at the start. This is the error for video not found. When video is not found it is also dispatches this error. There is no way of telling them apart. It does however send the 150/101 error correctly, which is the error for when the video is there but you’re not allowed to embed it.

So my solution is to keep in the error catching functions I added to catch when the video is there, but not allowed, then put in something that makes a request to the youtube api for the info on that video. If the ID is wrong or the video doesn’t exist then this will fail. I don’t like having to split my error handling up but it seems to be the only way.

Why youtube can’t get a measly couple of flash devs together to write a solid working player with no bugs or surprises is beyond me.

My changes to youtubeLoader.js:

function onYouTubePlayerReady(playerId) {

if (checkObj()) {

obj.addEventListener("onStateChange", "onytplayerStateChange");

obj.addEventListener("onError", "onytplayerError");

}

}

function onytplayerError(newState) {

//alert("Player's new state: " + newState);

obj.playerErrorHandler(newState);

}

My changes to youtubeLoader.as:

ExternalInterface.addCallback( "playerErrorHandler", playerErrorHandler);//Added to constructor

private function playerErrorHandler(errorCode:String):void

{

var e:YouTubeLoaderEvent = new YouTubeLoaderEvent(YouTubeLoaderEvent.IO_ERROR);

e.state = errorCode;

dispatchEvent(e);

}

Flash youtube nightmares.

So at work I’m working on a project that requires that youtube videos be embedded and controlled in an AS3 site. Unfortunately those lazy bastards at youtube still only have an AS2 chromeless player. This means that when you load it into your AS3 movie you can’t control it directly, you have to go through either local connection or javascript.

After a quick bit of research I decided on going the localConnection route, using TubeLoc, a nice and easy wrapper that loads in a ready made as2 swf and communicates using localConnection. Pretty simple and easy and I thought I had it cracked. Then we tested it around the office and found that it wouldn’t work on any of the office macs. It would work occasionally, but not reliably.

I got the tech department to set me up with a macbook myself so I could do some tests and research and found some pretty horrifying things. I found lots of people referring to localConnection not working correctly on Macs, especially since the last flash player update ( 10.0.32.18). Indeed, adobe did make a big change to how localConnection works on macs in that update, though they swear blind that it should be fully backwards compatible.

To test I made 2 swfs that use localConnection to simply send the contents of a text field back and forth. These worked perfectly on a PC, but on sporadically on the mac when I rebooted.

After this I concluded that I couldn’t trust localconnection, and so went over to the javascript method for the youtube api. This works, though it is a bit of a hassle, and it means that you can only test in a web-browser with the correct html and files.

If anyone has any suggestions I would love to hear them, otherwise I just wish Youtube would get off their arses and make an AS3 version of the player.

My localConnection test (switch LocalConnectionTest0 and LocalConnectionTest1 and save with different names - make sure you drag onto the browser as you standalone flash player probably won't be latest version):

package {
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.events.MouseEvent;
import flash.net.LocalConnection;
import flash.text.TextField;
import flash.text.TextFieldType;


public class LocalConnectionTest extends Sprite
{

private var receivingConnection :LocalConnection;
private var sendingConnection :LocalConnection;
private var inputTF :TextField;
private var outPuTF :TextField;

public function LocalConnectionTest()
{
receivingConnection = new LocalConnection();
receivingConnection.client = this;
receivingConnection.connect("LocalConnectionTest0");


sendingConnection = new LocalConnection();

inputTF = new TextField();
inputTF.type = TextFieldType.INPUT;
addChild(inputTF);
outPuTF = new TextField();
outPuTF.x = 200;
addChild(outPuTF);

var btn:Sprite = new Sprite();
addChild(btn);
btn.graphics.beginFill(0);
btn.graphics.drawCircle(100, 100, 20);
btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, send);
}

public function onLocalConnectionEvent(object_p:Object):void
{
inputTF.text = object_p.text;
}

public function send(evt:MouseEvent):void
{
sendingConnection.send("LocalConnectionTest1", "onLocalConnectionEvent", {text:inputTF.text});
inputTF.text = "";
}
}
}

The ethics of flash games sites.

OK, so I have my distinctly low rent flash games site up and running. While I am pleased I’m not 100% happy. This is because deep down I think that there is something deeply scummy and unethical about running this kind of site. The whole concept strikes me as being faintly parasitic. Essentially I’m trying to build a site using other people’s content without really adding any value of my own. I keep on telling myself 'hey, this is how the web works'. To an extent that's true - look at aggregator sites like the Huffington post, but that doesn't really say much. At least I'm not doing the Ebaum's world thing and pretending the games are mine.

A large part of my dislike for this kind of site stems from the fact that when I first started in flash game there was no Mochi ads, and my first, most popular games pretty much earned me nothing, despite clocking up millions of plays between them. None of my more recent, Mochi enabled games have been anywhere near as successful (lack of competition back then probably) and I’ve never been able to make any decent cash out of my games. Something I’m still oh so slightly bitter about.

Luckily now things are different. Mochi ads have changed everything, in that if someone has ads at the beginning of their game then any hits are good hit no matter where they come from. The other common way for game creators to make cash is by selling sponsorship, and I guess for that purpose any hits are good hits. I try to only put up games that are either clearly sponsored or have ads.

At some point I may try sponsoring some games myself, but as the moment I don't have the cash for that or the site/ad to take advantage of any upticks I may get. To be honest if I wanted to sponsor some good games that would actually generate some traffic I'd be up against the big boys anyway, and I don't think I'm up for that. At the moment the site is still a spare time hobby thing. Once you start sponsoring you need lawyers, accountants etc.

So, for the moment I'm going to try to carry on like this. I have a few games in the works, but my day job has really picked up and I'm not sure when I'll have enough time to look at them. Then I can start adding some games of my own and actually feel like the site isn't so worthless.

Sam's guide to freelancing

Part 1: Making an impression*  

Or rather, not making the wrong type of impression. 

This relates to two different facets of freelancing in digital agencies. The first is that most small to medium size agencies seem to have large tech departments, and as a consequence a gender spread of about 2 men for every woman. Unfortunately in too many case for me to count they will also have only 2 toilets and despite the gender disparity they divide them into one men's and one women's.  

The second is that at least initially people won't know who you are. Actually the chance are that they'll probably never know who you are unless they've worked with you directly. This means that if they need to refer to you down the line, say when they need more resource or (more likely) the project you worked on develops bug, they'll think of whatever first spring to mind.  

'Remember that big freelancer guy we had in?' 

 'You mean the dashingly handsome one?'  

'No, the morbidly obese one, you know, the one with really bad BO.'  

'Oh! That guy who did that huge dump in the women's toilet and we had to call the plumber?'  

Bingo. Don't let this be you.

*This may, or may not become an ongoing series depending on whether or not I can think of more nuggets of wisdom to share. And if I can be bothered.