So, if you have looked at our Work In Progress page you will notice that we have a lot of half-finished games and ideas that we plan to someday come back to.   To be honest, the list on that page really only scratches the surface.  I probably have 2 dozen more games to add on that page.  I plan to to start adding more as soon as possible, but there are so many that it cuts into my time to develop and finish ideas.

One of the games on that page is simply named Balloon .   It can’t recall exactly why I started to make it, but I’m sure it was for some type of game related to a girl’s toy in 2001.   At the time it seemed like a no-brainer:  who doesn’t like the the satisfying feeling of popping balloons?  (my wife, it turns out, but that’s another story)   However, after getting the rudimentary code finished that would allow the balloons to be randomly created and a mouse roll-over to pop them, I quit.   I still like the concept thouugh,  I think it will work especially well for Nintendo Wii focused browser games.

So, my first step was to take a look at the balloon.fla file to see what I was thinking 6 years ago.   Apparently, I was not thinking of much because the Flash 5 Actionscript programming was terrible.  Code on all sorts of layers, embedded in movie clips, embedded ON movie clips.   I decided to salvage the graphics only, and move on.    I have begun a new version named Balloon Pop based on the Fireworks Blast engine.    It is mostly object oriented at uses Actionscript 2.0 code, and has some physics and trig routines already built-in, which will help speed development.

The first real decison I have to make is how to handle the controls.  For a Web Flash Game, shooting ballons Pooyan style seems fun, but the for the Wii, this might pose a problem.  You can’t click the button fast enough (at least in my tests) to make a playable game that requires fast mouse clicks.    I might have to re-too la Wii version that relies on roll-over.  Hmm…