o yea, job’s fun, the environment is great, people are nice, the nearby park is awesome and the pay and benefits rock, so now I just need that laptop…

Hooray for Biome! Thanks to everyone who played the game, it was really fun to make. Now I’m looking forward to the next competition!

Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on making a card game as a personal project that I may end up selling to the owner of the analog version of the game, so I’m keeping that under wraps. Suffice to say, I really enjoyed the card game and always wanted a digital version so hopefully, this company will see that, too.

I found out a few hours ago that FlashPunk’s third game competition’s theme, just so happened to match the Life game that I had started a few days ago, so I stayed up all night fixing it up into a game (because it’s due very soon). It may not be very polished, but I enjoy playing it and hopefully, you will too. enjoy.

FlashPunk PunkWeek Biome

I decided to make this small genetics/life game because I just felt like creating a tiny world. This game starts out paused, so click the “P” button to toggle the pause and un-pause states.

Now a little about my world. It is filled with tiny plankton that are always abundant and serve as the source of food for my little creatures. Each creature starts as a little hungry ball and when it has eaten enough food, it matures into an adult. As an adult, these creatures will display their own color that was passed to them from their parents and their form diverges into either a male or female form. The adult creatures are no longer interested in food and must find a mate before their 20 second life span ends. If two creatures pair up, their life is over, but leave behind offspring which carry their parents colorful traits hidden within their gray shells.

There are some interesting things that happen when the population grows past 50, it is rare, so keep trying. In the meantime, I’ll work on balancing life by reducing instances of population extinction and limit overpopulation.

Life Game

WASD to scroll.
SPACE to make a new path.

I put in a map really quick, but I haven’t put in the mountains, yet. Most of my time has been spent trying to perfect this pathfinding system. It’s much closer to complete now than it was, but I think there is a small chance of having the path go into a loop rather than an arc or a line. There used to be a spot, you could visit on one of the islands, but it was causing a lot of problems. Although now pathways cut through the ocean and lakes. Still a work in progress.

Saturday was unexpectedly busy, so in this update I just cleaned up the line drawer. Now the lines fit snugly into the icons. You may still find the paths double-backing at the endpoints, but that’s not going to be an issue in the game with more map nodes and larger distances. I need to figure out how to scale out and see the entire map at once.

CONTROLS: WASD to move around the map
Button: Creates a new journey.

The map is completed on paper, but I can’t scan it until tomorrow (later today) when I visit Ralph and use his scanner, but in the meantime, I have completed my pathfinding component!

This system takes in a start point, end point and map of “Nodes” which contain information about that area. Then it will draw a pathway from start to finish. Sometimes it will be direct and other times it will choose stopping points in between (up to 2 stops). There is a known problem where it will start, go to a node, then back to the start and go on from there. In the future, I’ll remove the start and end points from the navigation array. I must take a moment to gloat as this doesn’t happen often, but I coded this entire system without running it until it was finished and when I finally did, it ran without error and performed as expected. Of course, I spent quite some time at Casey’s writing notes to myself about this system. It goes to show that having a proper plan before coding can save a lot of time in debugging.

I also ran across a site called, Nitrome. All of their games have charming, well-animated sprites and innovative gameplay mechanics. I’m impressed by their consistent quality. Well done!

Thanks to my friend James who sent me this link and introduced me to a unique genre of music known as, “Chap Hop.” Have a listen and see if you like the humor and rhymes of Professor Elemental. If you’re like me and can’t get enough of this, you can purchase his album for download at Tea Sea Records. Also check out Professor Elemental’s Home Page. Cheers!

Ok, I’ve embedded the XML. The reason it didn’t work with the external XML files is because the relative file pathways are converted to absolute pathways after the SWF is compiled. Now I guess I’ll change it so that you can either fill in the information or let the computer generate something for you for each field.