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[chinclub]

I just completed my first full flash game for the Chinchilla Club member's area.  There are a lot of chinchilla themed games on the site already but this is the first chinchilla themed game in flash and the first one I created myself.  I am so excited to hear everyone's thoughts before I start on my next game so I decided to open this one up to everyone for awhile to try. 

You don't have to be a club member to play this game, but if it tries to submit your score you will be taken to a password protected area.  Just hit your back button to play again.

Its a hidden object game with three different pictures to choose from.  Each picture is harder than the one before.  You have 30 seconds to try to click on all of the pictures listed in the box.  Please give it a try and then let me know what you think.  Good and bad.

You will probably find it irritating that there isn't a play again button on the final screen.  That is because club members will always be submitting the score and then returning to the game from the next page.  Those of you who are not club members just have to reload the page to play again.

http://www.chinchillaclub.com/member/game/hiddenpictures.php

Thanks for trying it and I look forward to your feedback and ideas for future games.

[Debbie.nl.ca]

  I'm not very good 

[chinclub]

I was just told that some people didn't see the chinchilla game, they saw a pearl hunt game instead.  I fixed the script error.  So if you didn't see the Hidden Pictures game, please try again.

[GrayRodent]

It works very well on my computer. Some of the graphics are obviously cut out and maybe some refinements can be made to the edges. The broom is a case in point. You should increase the tolerance of the masking tool that you are using and compare it to a dark background. Which really seems minor to me, btw.

A major flaw is that is not immediately obvious as to what the object of the game is. You might actually want to state "Click on each object in the picture that appears on the list. You have exactly 30 seconds." and then underneath have a button that says "Start".

30 seconds seems too short as well. I recommend shooting for a two to five minute timeframe just as a personal preference. I might adjust the time based on the average percentage of objects found by most users. Looks like I averaged maybe 10 percent on the first three runs. Maybe increase the time until the average user approaches 50% or higher.

I'm not sure how the scoring is integrated into the game. I would want it to bring the data in from the database and make a list of the top 20 or so scores. It might be fun to have a ranking that will update every 10 seconds. A countdown timer would be nice as well.

Have fun

Chris

[chinclub]

Hi Chris,
Thanks for the great feedback.  The game was created for the members area and on that page there is a description of how to play the game which is why I didn't include it in the actual game itself.

I have never played with flash before and downloaded the free 30 day trial of adobe to play around with it.  It seems a little harder for me to pick up than php but since I'm self teaching and rushing to learn it in a few days I'm sure I am missing a lot.  I hate to take a lot of time  since I can't afford the full copy of the software at $700.    Only 10 days left on the trial. 

Anyway, since these will be one time build games and it only has 3 levels I thought 30 secs was best.  Otherwise it would be played once or twice and mastered.  With 30 seconds I figure people could play again and again and without quite figuring out everything.  As for the counter...honestly, I just couldn't make the darn thing work! 

Scoring...yet another area that eludes me! I did figure out how to make a button go to a URL so basically if you find everything you get one score and if you don't you get another.  When you submit score it sends you to  one URL or the other which then adds your score to your account in the database through PHP code.   

[GrayRodent]

I looked into how to compile adobe flash's code and suspected there might be an open source solution since Actionscript, Flash's language, is open source. You can use the Adobe Flex SDK which will give you access to a compiler and use the FlashDevelop IDE (free software) to do the scripting.

There are apparently a couple of options to export graphics to .swf format (although I have not tried it) using Inkscape, which is a well designed vector art program. It will require an export plugin. The goal is to use the IDE to build the program to control the .swf graphics. Both GIMP and Inkscape are free graphics programs that can be useful for creating graphics.

If I am allowed to post links I'll be glad to provide them.

Chris

[chinclub]

Thanks, I would love the links. We don't have strict rules like that here. 

[GrayRodent]

This is a list of open source programming tools for ActionScript.
I'm sure there are others out there as well. The most important part of this toolset is documentation and learning the language which can be done online. There are some books available as well.

FlashDevelop is a text based IDE for coding Actionscript
It should download and install the API and compiler in its installer.
http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page

SWFTools.org provides command line tools to perform various tasks and useful conversions.
http://www.swftools.org/

SVG2SWF provides a way to convert SVG (vector graphics) to SWF.
This allows you to create the graphical layout using an SVG grahpic
s editor.
http://svg2swf.sourceforge.net/

INKSCAPE - my favorite SVG and vector graphics editor (open source)
http://inkscape.org/

Inkscape also utilizes bitmap images which can be manipulated by this editor.
http://www.gimp.org

Actionscript 3.0 language reference can be found here:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/index.html

[chinclub]

Thanks so much for the links.  I will certainly check them out!

[GrayRodent]

I would like to mention GameMaker and SGDK.
GameMaker costs about 100 USD and provides a very nice graphical interface. It can make some cool looking web games. I've never used it but the demos looks good.
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/windows

SGDK can make games using HTML 5. It is free, but not near as polished and geared towards making platform games. (But it can be used for other types of games.)
They recently began developing an HTML5 export feature. It appears it would require additional coding to make the output work.
I've helped the developers test this one and it a solid IDE for standalone games for OpenGL compliant systems.
http://sgdk2.sourceforge.net/

Blender can be used to make games, but not online games. It is remarkably versatile and its game engine does not require hard coding, but a little knowledge of python can go a long way.

[chinclub]

I have been steering away from HTML5 as I thought it wasn't compatible with all browsers yet.  But then that was awhile ago.  Is that still a problem?

[GrayRodent]

I expect that there will be a percentage of users with browsers that cannot natively support it. IE7 is one of them. It appears that most mobile browsers are compliant. The Firefox browser that I use also supports it, however not all demos I tried worked properly. For example the SGDK scrolling demo was slow, although it did work.

At this point it appears that Flash is dominating.

[chinclub]

That was my thinking as well.

[GrayRodent]

I had some time to do more research on learning flash.
There are some open source game engines available with libraries to make coding easier.
Apparently there are two big ones including Flixel
http://flixel.org/, and Flashpunk khttp://flashpunk.net/

On the flashpunk website there is a tutorial that walks you through setting up the FlashDevelop IDE. It looks very well written. Flixel may allow for more complex systems though.

I did come accross an intriguing website that has free software that takes the WYSIWYG approach to flash games called stencyl. It is geared towards non-coders.

http://www.stencyl.com/

A good website with resources for learning can be found here:

http://flashgamedojo.com

Happy coding

[chinclub]

Thanks!  I am looking forward to checking those out this weekend.