'm not usually associated with high performance Flash programming around here, as Jeff does most of that kind of writing. I usually settle into puzzle games, kids games, and games that never see the light of day.
However, this 4K thing has me energized. It reminds me of the the Atari 2600 programmers I have read and written so much about in the past decade. The art and science of using both the features and limitations of the "hardware" (in this case, the Flash player) and the software (4K of addressable space) is thrilling.
Back in 1993 I started my career writing 80386 Assembly Language for a small computer company. At the time my job was to convert 16-bit Assembly code to 32-bit Assembly, and then in-turn, re-write all of it as C++. I know that might sound like a horrible job, but in fact, it was a great way to learn. We had to be very careful about loading registers, the stack, far pointers, bit-wise operations, etc. I can't say that I became any kind of expert, but for a good 3 years this kind of work was the ground floor of my software development education.
o I just finished added our pre-loader, title screen, mochi ads and mochi leaderboard, and some support code for those those things to my 4K games and it is now 100K!
In reality, 100K is not that much, but think about 100K in terms of a percentage of actual gaming worth, and it's fairly astonishing. It means that the final game is 4K of game code, and 96K of useless non-sense (OK, fairly useful useless non-sense, but as far as the game in concerned, not necessary at all).
K, here is my entry into the 4K game competition. It's actually 8K now with the Mochi services added...
hen I was starting a new project to take my 4K game and turn it into a 32K monster yesterday, I noticed something odd. My code would not compile. On further inspection, I had forgotten to include a custom class in my new project. A custom class, that is, that was totally unecessary. By removing that class reference, I gained by 800 bytes!