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Game Poetry 4K Game Competition Post-mortems
3/20/2009 by: Jeff Fulton
Category: Flash Game Development, Series:Game Contests , Syndication:(XML/RSS)
ame Poetry 4K Game Competition Post-mortems

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Urbansquall has posted 4 Post-mortems on games in the 4K Game Competition.
Aside from my all too long entry on Mine-X 4K, you can read about Face Dodge, Falling With Style, and Grompers.

I again want to thank Urbansquall and Gamingyourway.com again for running a great, fun contest (and for giving me yet another platform on which to pontificate).



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Mines and Bricks in 64K?
3/14/2009 by: Jeff Fulton
Category: Flash Game Development, Series:Game Contests , Syndication:(XML/RSS)

ines and Bricks in 64K?

The judging for the first and second jury prizes in the 4K game competition is over. Two simply incredible entries won (A-Steroids4K and Dungeon Romp).   Unfortunately neither my Mine-X 4K (Mochi version, 4K Comp version) or Steve's Neon Bricks 4K (Mochi version, 4K Comp version) was good enough to warrant a judge prize. Also, after looking at the competition for the audience prize, I would not even vote for my own.

The competition is fierce among the other (non-winners) for the audience prize and I am especially impressed by this 3D entry - 4k Pillars as well as this pretty much full version of Rampart (one of my favorite games of all time).  Every game was very well done, and quite an accomplishment in 4K, but I would like to also shout out the entries by Squize, Richard Davey, Jonathanasdf, and Scott Delamater as other personal favorites...




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4K Game Competition Game #2 (game spoiler)
3/9/2009 by: Jeff Fulton
Category: Flash Game Development, Series:Game Contests , Syndication:(XML/RSS)
K Game Competition Game #2 (game spoiler)

I have decided to post my contest entry also. This is NOT the exact same game as I added one line of instruction text and the Mochi Services (which bloated it to 16K). Also, I am having some problems with the Mochi High Score. It seems in inconsistently want to send in the score from the previous game and not the current game. very strange.



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I'm at 3.9K!!!
2/21/2009 by: Jeff Fulton
Category: Flash Game Development, Series:Game Contests , Syndication:(XML/RSS)
have been focused in my limited free time this week on getting my 8K game down to 4K. I still have at least one more optimization to do and then a couple things to add, but I am at 3.9K!

Here are a couple of the things I needed to do to get here:
1. No optimized game loop - good old onEnterFrame is working fine
2. No object farms for projectiles or particles
3. No classes other than the main one
4. No embedded anything (sounds, bitmaps).
5. Simple Vectors drawn in code for game graphics.
6. As few functions as possible
7. I am sharing as many variables as global as I can.
8. I am importing as few Flash built-in classes as possible
9. No pre-created arrays of movement vectors
10.  I don't pre find the length of my arrays for for loops
11. I have actually repeated code in a few places rather than create a re-usable function

All of that is contrary to how I would optimize a game for speed, but in this case I need to squeeze as much game a possible into this tiny file size

What I left in:
I still have a completely blitted output screen which allows me to do a couple things that I can't say just in case UrbanSquall reads this and it gives away which game is mine.

The one optimization I have left is to combine my update and render loops into one and do collision after (not the correct way, I know). I feel that this will save me enough file size to add in the a few messages needed for game play, start, end, and a graphical enhancements (still no chance at sounds)

I certainly hope to have the 4K version done this weekend so I can start work on the AWESOME 16K version =) that will have 4X the features.  It will be like going from the speccy to the Amiga.



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7.3K and counting
2/17/2009 by: Jeff Fulton
Category: Flash Game Development, Series:Game Contests , Syndication:(XML/RSS)
.3K and counting

Just a quick update from the house of the 4 deathly ill. Between trips to the doctor, drug store, and even a complete (although partially disastrous) appearance at my day job, I was able to get an almost code complete version of my 4K game going.  The problem is, it's 7.3K (the Mac says is is 16K, so we're going to rely on fat32 for our real count, now aren't we?)

Anyway, it is still full of extra features and bloated code, so I hope to get it down to 4K abouts as soon as a free minute comes up... (just not this current minute mind you). 



Questions? Comments? Email us here: info@8bitrocket.com
4k Game Competition: So I'm at 4k already...
2/12/2009 by: Jeff Fulton
Category: Flash Game Development, Series:Game Contests , Syndication:(XML/RSS)
k Game Competition: So I'm at 4k already...

I have been working on a game for the UrbanSquall / GamingYourway 4K game competition this week and I have already hit 4K in my swf. It will probably surprise no one that the game I'm working on is an Arcade shooter. I have created my game loop using the optimized sleep based active renderer, I have a state machine created using Squize's main function swap method (I can't find the link to it on his site), and the entire game is currently one class (with no hope for it to be any more).

I have also been working on ways to build and draw all of my sprites in code to ensure that nothing needs to be embedded (if I have any size left I may import a few simple tones for sound fx). The on the fly created bitmaps actually have not added as much file size as my unoptimized code though. I currently have a player ship on the screen and a number of enemies (they all look the same though). The player can move and shoot, but that is all. I am just under 4K at this point with a number of things to add to make it a game:

1. Scrolling
2. Score and score display
3. Title screen and instructions
...



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Why does the 4K game competition excite me so much?
2/10/2009 by: Jeff Fulton
Category: Flash Game Development, Series:Game Contests , Syndication:(XML/RSS)

hy does the 4K game competition excite me so much?

I have been down lately, really really down. A plethora of problems with my house, with work, with the world economy, and with my personal economy have put my attitude and psyche in the complete crapper lately.

So, why does the 4K Game Competition, sponsored jointly by our friends and colleges at UrbanSquall and GamingYourWay excite me so much?  It might be because I am just now finishing up the incredible book, Racing the Beam, which goes in depth into the development of 6 original Atari 2600 carts. This book details how skilled the brilliant original 2600 coders were at squeezing game play into 2K (and then later 4 and 8K carts) given the serious limitations of the VCS architecture. Basically the machine was meant to play Pong and Tank (and it did those incredibly well), but was never meant to have multiple sprites for games like Asteroids, Space Invaders or Pac Man. It took some serious trickery to simulate multiple sprites and effects on the machine. Scrolling horizontally was a HUGE problem and the machine didn't use a bitmapped screen, it used a line by line display based on the firing on the electron gun in the TV.  NOTHING about making those games was simple. I'm about to finish the book and need something to work on. I have multiple personal game projects going, but all of them are HUGE engineering efforts that take a lot of time to even get back into, much less make any significant progress on...




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