he latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers.

I missed this one a couple weeks ago, but for all of us BitmapData heads, Colby from CheezeWorld.com has created a BitmapClip class that he is giving away for free. Here is his list of features:

1. Import MovieClip, Sprite, and even tilesheets!
2. Animate each clip at it's own frame rate.
3. Control it just like you would a MovieClip.
4. It even creates pre-rotated frames for you! Now you can have super fast animated clips AND support rotation! WOOT.
5. You can also support scaling by simply adding the clip to a sprite without losing *much* speed.

It looks very promising and easy to use.

etro Flash Game Highlights: May 9th 2008

Here are 8bitrocket.com we have decided to start posting a weekly set of the best Retro and Retro inspired Flash games the world of viral gaming has to offer. This week we will start with 8 games that caught our interest from 100's that we looked at this week.

Tennis for You

First of all the name of this one is brilliant. "Tennis For You" is take on "Tennis For Two" which was the original tag line for Pong. Also, the sounds here are perfect, they elicit the feeling of being in the arcade in the 70's. The game play is Pong with power-ups. A nice little diversion...

here are millions of games out there (there is even a site with that name), but original game ideas are few and far between. You don't have to be completely original to make a good game, but being different from the crowd certainly can get you noticed. Instead of cloning the latest fad games on the portal home pages, why not try something a little different? ...

e have been working over the past few weeks to figure out what the future-state will be for http://www.8bitrocket.com. We have tried out several different blogs, dabbled in Mid-Core Gaming and other features, but everything seems to lead back to the same place: Flash Game Development and Retro Games. For this reason, we will be expanding the site in two different ways in the coming weeks.

o I have been trying come-up with a weekly column about Atari retro games that will be as interesting for others to read as it will be for me to write. My current attempt at this is this new blog "Atari Advertisement Excavation" in which I dig through some old dusty computer and video games mazines until I find something that sparks a memory, and then spill (what I believe are) interesting details about gaming history and/or my own experiences with them.

I'll start this with this ad for the game Mr. Cool .

Mr. Cool was a Q-Bert style game for the Atari 400/800 released in 1983 by Sierra On-Line(SierraVision). To be honest, even though I really enjoyed Mr. Cool back-in-the-day,  I don't recall it being any kind of significant release. However, a few years ago I had the privilege to meet the author, a very significant figure in the history of classic games, Peter Oliphant under some semi-interesting circumstances. Here is the story.

his week we visit Kongregate, and find 5 new releases that we love to play.

I don't just look at the ratings that users give, but there are so many games, I do take them into account. If a game looks retro or fun, but has a bad rating, I still give it a play. Also, I don't read instructions (unless a game seems fun after the first play), and so many games are uploaded to the portals that I have to do a pre-screen based on descriptions and icons...

he latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers.

Panyoti at Game Poetry comes through with a very insightful entry on where and when it is best to comment your code in Commenting Your Code is a Waste of Time.

Mochiland also comes also comes out with both barrels firing this week. Two very interesting reads can be had in both Why the Masses Are Right and Selling Premium Content: The Drunken Masters Experiment. The former is a discussion of how to use the sometimes insightful and sometimes inflammatory comments your games receive on sites like New Grounds. The later is a recounting of an experiment in monetizing a game with a premium downloadable version (as well as a free version). Both are very worth your time...

he Chris Crawford spearheaded "Interactive Storytelling" authoring/publishing/playing toolset, Storytron is nearing completion. The new Storytron.com web site launched a few days ago, and the new blog contained a tantalizing bit of information. Chris Crawford is re-making his classic PC/Mac geo-political pot-boiler, Balance Of Power using the toolset.

've been furiously working on the follow-up to my History Of Atari :Part 1 for Gamasutra (it's been so long since the first one that they've probably given-up on it), and I dug up a couple quotes for something that struck me as quite interesting.  It seems that Atari might have designed a version of their hit coin-op Missile Command for the military. It has been well reported that Atari worked on a version of their 1980 coin-op hit Battelzone for the U.S. Military.  Sometime in 1980 Atari was approached by the Army to help create a version of Battlezone to use for combat training.

he latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers.

This week we cover game loops, a cool new retro game (by Squize), a dictionary object framework for game objects, Andre Michelle's new project, lessons in promoting your game, an AS3 CS3 (not Flex) pre-loader, brainstorming games, and a basic guide for beginners in starting to make flash games.

Game Poetry, Game Poetry, Game Poetry. I can't say it enough, but this site RULEZ. Panayoti has a great new entry on Understanding the Game Loop. It discusses creating a deterministic game loop to help prevent the tunneling or pass through negative effect when collision detection is not properly timed...