Category: Uncategorized

  • Flash AS3 Speed Tests: Rendering and Update Models

    About a week ago I jumped into a discussion on Flashkit about AS3 sprite sheets, rendering, etc. There were a lot of good ideas being thrown around, and I put in my 2 cents on how my current engine works. Originally, back in the AS2 days (and early days of…

  • Pollypocket.com Soccer Kid

    When you make marketing based web games it is very tough to know if people like them or not.  There is very little feed back, and even if someone wanted to tell you they liked your game, they would have no way to find you.   However, today  I found this…

  • Pumpkin Man Mid-Mortem

    Games take a long time to make. Seriously, games are a bitch to make. I started my latest game as a supposed month long project to update Pacman into the semi-modern (circa 1990) age. I figured that Pacman would be a pretty easy game to make, and I also wanted…

  • 10 Lines Of Silence For Evel Knievel

    … … … … … … … … … … The legend of my childhood, Evel Knievel died today at the age of 69.  Sure, he has not had the highest profile for past 30 or so years, and sure he did beat that journalist with a baseball bat, but…

  • Anatomy of a Flash Game: Lesson 1 – Setting up the game

    My newest Flash game tutorial is up at Mochiland.  Anatomy of a Flash Game: Lesson 1 – Setting up the game is the first in a series of articles that will show, in fine detail, how to construct a Flash game using basic object oriented methodology.   The game constructed during the…

  • Required Playing: Atari ST Games

    Title: Lethal XcessYear: 1991Publisher: EclipseDeveloper: X-TrollGame Design: Marc Rosocha, Heinz Rudolph, Claus FrienGraphics: Heinz RudolphProgramming: Claus Frien, Heinz RudolphMusic: Jochen Hippel Sifting through my huge collection of vintage games and roms, I have selected a few I have never played to test out. First up is an Atari ST /…

  • Where Is My Must Have, Retro Game Collection For The Holidays?

    Every Christmas for at least the past decade, my brother Jeff and I have traded retro game collections for Christmas. It started in 1998 when I discovered MAME and Dave’s Video Game Classics. I collected a CD of ROMS and Emulators, printed a fancy CD label, and gifted it to…

  • Pixel Chix Flippin’ Kitchen Goes Live!

    My first (as a developer) web+toy (Toys that interact with the web) project went live today: Pixel Chix Flippin’ Kitchen.   The game is “inspired” by the “Cooking Mama” DS and Wii game.  You use your mouse to mix, cut, fry in mini games trying to make multiple dishes.  Here is the…

  • History Of Atari 1971-1977

    My latest writing project, “Part 1” of the History Of Atari (1971-1977) went up today at Gamasutra. The series is culmination of nearly 5 years of research and include content from my own personal interviews with Nolan Bushnell, Chris Crawford, Ralph Baer, David Crane, and others.  You can read it here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2000/the_history_of_atari_19711977.php

  • Great Article On The 50 Greatest Game Design Innovations

    Ernest Adams has written a fantastic article for http://www.next-gen.biz about the “50 Greatest Game Design Innovations”.   There is tons of good content here to get you thinking, mull over, and argue about.  Take a look at it here: http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=7769&Itemid=2 Here are some of my comments about the entries: 3. Stealth…

  • Actionscript 3: Tutorial – BitmapData rotation with a matrix

    The bitmapData class has been a revelation for advanced Flash game programmers. With it, one can replicate the sprite sheet magic that 8-bit game wizards produced on machines such as the Atari 800, C=64 and Nintendo NES. I have covered the use of sprite sheets and BitmapData in a previous…

  • Hotwheels.com Spin City Game Goes Live!

    Finally, my newest game for Hotwheels.com has gone live!  “Hot Wheels Spin City Drive-Thru Dilemma” is my casual game “sequel” to “Hot Wheels Accelracers Track Mod“, released in 2005.   It is not really a “sequel” though, as it’s game-play is based on the “Diner Dash” model, not on the “Pipe…

  • MochiAds Goes Public!

    It looks like MochiAds has gone public today!  Check themout over at http://www.mochiads.com.   Also, they something new called “Customoized Ads” that looks very interesting…We’ll report more later when we know the details.

  • Implementing MochiAds in a Flash AS3 Class

    MochiAds are still in beta, but we here at 8bitrocket are firm supporters of this system. Mochi seems to be one of the few systems that is looking out for the independent developer. You can read more in Steve’s entry from a few weeks back. I am designing a new…

  • Launching Pad: Redesigning a Retro Classic #1: Pacman

    The last retro classic I redesigned was Asteroids when I created the game Retro Blaster. While I love early classic games, I also completely understand and appreciate how Nintendo, Sega, and other late 80’s innovators built upon classic themes to re-ignite the video game industry. Not only did they create…

  • Mochiads: Maybe The Best Thing For Flash Game Developers Since…Well…Flash

    I’ve been experimenting with the beta version of MochiMedia’s Mochiads system for the past few weeks. My first impression is that, when Mochiads finally rolls out to the public, it will help revolutionize the viral/free Flash game landscape. Mochimedia have already been providing a very useful product named Mochibot for…

  • Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #3: Bitmap Collision Detection

    Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #3: Bitmap Collision detection One of the great features of Flash AS2 and AS3 is the ability to use the non-transparent colored pixels in a bitmapData object to accomplish pixel level hit detection. In this tutorial, we will build upon the last last…

  • “Free Fireworks” Flash Engine Launches

    Today we are launching our SECOND in a series of free, configurable game/activity engines for the web (following closely on the heels of “Free Jigsaw“).  This one a further evolution of our “fireworks show” engine that can now be configured for almost any purpose. You can watch fireworks launch, and/or…

  • Atari-infogrames, On The Ropes?

    “Retro Rogue” martyg, a frequent visitor to our fourms (“frequent” is a relative term on our forums) has written a very detailed and insightful article about the fate of the Atarinfogrames.    In the article, martyg writes: Atari management has had more changing faces and directions than a chameleon stuck in…

  • Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #2: Asynchronous key detection for arcade games.

    In Adobe’s attempt to “improve” every aspect of Actionscript, they deleted some features that arcade game programmers have relied on for years. One of the most fundamental aspects in most arcade games is accurately timed user input detection. Sadly, this has been made much more difficult (but not impossible) in…

  • Electroserver 4 Announced! Supports 200,000 Concurrent User Multiplayer Flash Games!

    The guys over at Electrotank have finally announced the released of ElectroServer 4.0, (ES4)their massive update to their already impressive Electroserver 3 multi-player socket-server.   ES4 is more than just a simple version upgrade.  New features for ES4 include: 200,000 concurrent users.  Site like Webkins now get about 30,000 concurrent users using…

  • “Free Jigsaw”, A Free, Configurable, Animated Jigsaw Puzzle Engine For Flash.

    Free Jigsaw is free-to-use, configurable, simple, Jigsaw Puzzle engine written in Flash. “Free Jigsaw” can support any number of images, and supports “animated” puzzles using .swf files. You can re-skin the the presentation of “Free Jigsaw” by editing the included .xml file and providing your own background and button images.…

  • Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Game Primer #1: Tile Maps, XML, and bitmapData

    One of the most useful advances in Flash 8 and CS3 for game developers has been the use of raw bitmap data to render on screen images. The CS3 / AS3 implementation has been changed from AS2, so this tutorial will go through the basics of creating, loading, and displaying…

  • A Tribute To Larry Snyder From The Midnight Coders, makers of WebOrb for Flash

    (Larry Snyder: 1940-2007) I was very upset to learn today that Larry Snyder has passed away., The 67 year-old was head of sales for Midnight Coders, the developers of WebOrb, an ASP.NET 2.0 replacement for Flash Remoting.   I’d been in negotiations with Larry for the past 7 months to purchase…

  • Where is the great, all-encompassing history of Atari?

    OK, now that I’ve suffered through the Atari bashing in the well-written but overly biased Commodore love-fest On The Edge, and complete disregard for Atari history in books like Fire In The Valley and Accidental Empires, I’m ready to ask the question: Where is the great, all-encompassing history of Atari?…

  • Wii.HotWheels.com Arena Launches! Includes Multi-player Game For Wii Opera Users

    Over at http://www.hotwheels.com they have just launched the Wii Arena (http://wii.hotwheels.com), a section of the site dedicated to users coming to the site with the Wii Opera Browser.  Among the games offered (including simplified version of very popular TrackMod Game) is the brand new Multi-Player on-line Collectible Card Racing Game: Finish…

  • Flash CS3: Actionscript 3 (AS3) Primer: Where does my code go?

    Actionscript 3 is complete re-write of the Actionscript language that fuels Flash’s ability to create dynamic content and games. It could be said that AS3 is such a departure that many designers and some programmers will be left in the dark by this new version. I for one, think AS3…

  • Creating Custom Events In Flash AS3 (ActionScript 3)

    I’ve only been working with Flash AS3 for a very short time, but I’m already very happy with it. Even though it is not as accessible as AS2, the power of the new language features are unmistakable. One very powerful feature of AS3 is the built-in event handling. Event handing…

  • An 16-bit road less traveled: Atari ST (and Amiga) Games – 16-bit degrees of separation #1.

    I started with 8-bit degrees of separation last week where I investigated some rare/forgotten Atari 800 games. This week I’ll take my investigation up to the 16-bit level. Here is how the game is played. First I choose a random Atari ST game, then I search out related games, developers…

  • 10 Ways To Help Get Traffic To Your Flash Game

    We at 8bitrocket.com have been trying promote our games at a grassroots level for the past few months.  In that time, we have met with some marginal success getting our games seen and played.   If making your game is hard enough, getting people to see it and play it is…

  • Retro Blaster Update: A new high score has been obtained in Retro Blaster.

    A player who goes by the name of Stephen Allen has sent in a picture of his score and a successful completion of the game: 101,773,150 points! This is the current recorded high score by someone other than me! Thanks, Stephen (if that’s your real name), for taking the time…

  • An 8-bit road less traveled: Atari 800 Games – 8-bit degrees of separation.

    I have loads and loads of Atari 800 games to play via emulation. I have tried nearly 1100 in my quest to try every game available. Today I decided to play Atari 8-bit degrees of separation. I will start with one random 8-bit Atari 800 game, play it, review it,…

  • Bob Cringely Finally Discovers Flash!

    I don’t know how I missed this.  I’ve been reading Bob Cringely’s column at pbs.org for the past 10 years or so, and I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it.  Bob was one of the first people to embrace “Geek” culture. His book “Accidental Empires” is a must-read for anyone…

  • Space Eggs Cracked Open!

    A new game, called Space Eggs, has launched on 8bitrocket.com.We want more games on this site, so I have been going back and finishing up ideas of games I started a while back. The first was a game called Gradient Asteroids Optimized. It was the beginnings of the first game…

  • 3 Flash “Fireworks” Activities For The 4th Of July

    Here are 3 different interactive Flash activities for the the 4th of July: Raindown Fireworks Show This activitiy was designed to promote The Alarm’s single “Raindown” last year.  It is an interactive show.  The fireworks will got automatically, but it you press the [space bar] you can configure the color…

  • Sploder Game: Fantastic Journey

    OK, here is my last Sploder game with the current engine.  It’s called “Fantastic Journey”.  Travel through a human body to fight of disease and infaction in the legs, arms, heart, brain, etc. Play Below:   http://www.sploder.com/player.php?s=7ntjxvst Make Your Own Game

  • An 8-bit road less traveled: Great Atari 800 Games Part I

    Great 8-bit home computer games didn’t start and end with the C=64 in the 80’s. Classic 8-bit computer games were enjoyed on many other computers, the Atari 800 being arguably the premier computer gaming platform in the USA for about 3 years (1980-1982). This dominance ended when the low cost…

  • Sploder: Making My First Game : Death Cavern X1

    I just finished my first “game” using Sploder.  I suppose it is almost identical to most “first” Sploder games.  It includes a massive, intricate playfield, and some randomly placed obstacles and pick-ups.  You can play it below: http://www.sploder.com/player.php?s=6g9n55ng Make Your Own Game Making a game in Sploder is very easy. …

  • My Second Sploder Game: Sploder Pac-Man

    For my second Sploder game, I decided to try to make something that was not necessarilly a full-on shooter.  Since Sploder has a “collectible” object, I decided to try to create a game as close to Pac-Man as possible.  The result is below.   http://www.sploder.com/player.php?s=uq9zx991 Make Your Own Game   As you…

  • Hilarious “History Of Flash ActionScript” Video

    Legendary Flash developer Scott Delamater produced this video last year for Flash’s 10th anniversary.   If you were there from the beginning, you’ll understand just how much Flash has grown in the past 10 years. Check out the video here.

  • Midnight Flash Game Design #4: The Cold, Clammy Grip Of Reality

    Well, my plans for working an hour a night on a game in June were completely thwarted by reality.  After 3 days of development, a friend of Jeff and mine requested help to finish a project.  We spent nearly 7 days helping to build this game for the Bridezillas TV…

  • Sploder: A Cool New “Game Construction Set” Site

    I just followed a banner ad from our site to this new Web 2.0 style “user created content” site named Sploder .   Sploder is a site that allows users to create their own “games” and share them with people, embed them on other sites, etc.   It’s a really cool application that…

  • Commodork vs. Atari Nerds : Common Ground?

    A few days ago we received a nice message from Rob O’Hara, the author of the the book Commodork.  Rob had written in response to this blog entry, the first one that I wrote when starting this site last December.   I mentioned then that while I liked his book, and…

  • The Punk Rock Group’s Retro Madness

    In a bloglines.com search for Atari 800 (yes, I have THAT much free time tonight), I came across this very interesting band called The Punk Rock Group. Check out their music section for some Devo inspired retro-low-fi music hilarity in songs like Atari 800, Video Games and Toby Keith. Also,…

  • Midnight Flash Game Design #2: Public Domain Music For Flash, And A Challenge

    To continue from my last entry , I am trying to finish a Flash game in 27 days. This probably does not sound very hard, but these “days” actually equate to about 27 hours of programming time. Subtract all the time I take to write these blog entries, and time…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming: A Finite State Machine Game Loop.

    One of the most unorganized things in my games are the actual game loops. The game loop is the meat of the game and although it usually starts off to be a pretty simple select case statement running inside of an interval, once I get fully involved in a game,…

  • Atari Timeline: 1975

    1975: Atari releases Compugraph Foto Machine Atari, Inc. introduces the COMPUGRAPH FOTO, a coin-operated machine that printed life-sized pictures on computer paper for customers. .The machined weighed-in at an astronomical 950 pounds! It contained a combination of an impact line printer, a computer, and a closed-circuit TV. Advertised as Durastress’ 1975: January 31: Atari/Kee Games…

  • Guitar Hero : Air Guitar Stance Poll

    I’m very curious.  How do you others play “Guitar Hero”?  Do you playing sitting down like Keith Richards,  standing up swinging your arm like Pete Townsend,  “machine gunning” like Nigel Tufnel, or do you just feel like an idiot while playing?  Take the public poll here: http://www.8bitrocket.com/forums/Default.aspx?g=posts&m=30&#30 (no need to log-in to…

  • Flash: Fixing getTimer() To Stop (Some) Game Cheaters

    The one and only Flash Guru Jobe Maker posted this story on his blog today: Cheating – Controlling the Speed of Games Externally Jobe Writes: From what I’ve heard this technique will not slow the Flash frame rate, but rather affects the return result of getTimer(). As you probably know,…

  • Jobe Makar’s Blog

    Jobe Makar, one of the premier authorities on Flash game programming, and one of the geniuses behind the Electro-server multi player Flash server has started a blog that ANYONE interested in Flash game programming or Flash programming in general should check out. Jobe is the real deal, and besides knowing…

  • The Atari History Timeline: 1973

    1973 March: Pong Is A hit!  By March of 1973, Pong  was deemed a bona fide phenomenon for Atari Inc..   They had sold 8000-10000 machines, and would eventually sell upwards of 35,000.     In one year, Atari made a little over $3.2 million dollars.   However, there was a black side…

  • The Atari History Timeline: 1971-1972

    1971: Spring : Bushnell Creates Computer Space  Nolan Bushnell created the first coin-op video game in his daughter’s bedroom in 1971 while working for Ampex.  Inspired by Steve Russell’s  Space War,  a game he played on the DEC PDP-1 at the University of Utah in the 60’s,  Bushnell worked on…

  • Yet Another forum .NET: A Very Easy To Install And Use .NET Forum Application

    We just added new Forums to 8bitrocket.com and it took 3 hours. That’s 3 hours from downloading the source, to skinning and configuring it for us. We used the open source Yet Another Forum .NET and we are very pleased. I have been looking for a decent, easy to integrate…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Using Actionscript to loop mp3 files. Plus free music for your games!

    While I am in the process of completing the next lesson for my Advanced Flash Game Programming set of tutorials, I have decided to take a little break and create some music loops for my games. Yesterday, via snail mail, I received a little gem I purchased called Magix Music…

  • Is Silverlight A Flash Killer? Hardly…Unless You Want Built-In 3D Support

    Microsoft recently announced the beta of Silverlight, their obvious stab at taking market-share from the Adobe Flash Platform. As a die hard Flash developer, I was very interested to see just what Silverlight could do, so I decided to download the beta and try out some of the examples on…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection Part III (or let’s start a real game)

    In Part 1 – Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection I discussed the very basics of doing Pixel level hit detection with the bitmapData object. In Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection Part II (or let’s add Bitmap animation caching) I added…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection Part II (or let’s add Bitmap animation caching)

    In Part 1 – Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection I discussed the very basics of doing Pixel level hit detection with the bitmapData object. In this second part, I am going to add one more small feature that hopefully will improve the performance of your…

  • Advanced Flash 8 Game Programming : Pixel level collision detection

    I had to take a little break after finishing Retroblaster to unwind before I started making games again. I plan to re-write my game loop and much of my game code in this public forum for a couple reasons. One is the selfish need of a cathartic outlet, and the…

  • PC Games are Dead!

    That seems a little sensational doesn’t it? Well it is exactly how I feel right now. Even if you don’t take into account the abject failure of Vista or the re-emergence of Nintendo, there are reasons why I feel the PC games are dead. I am even one of those…

  • Dear John (err, I mean Final Fantasy)

    Dear Final Fantasy , Final Fantasy , do you believe in love?  I hope you do, because I think then you can understand just what I have found. I have found true love and its’ name is Paper Mario. It is the perfect game. We’ve had some good times Final…

  • Ode To An Unreleased Game: Atari 5200 Asteroids

    Ode To An Unreleased Game: Atari 5200 Asteroids Prototype lifestyleSitting on a shelf somewhereWaiting to have life They programmed me toLaunch the 5200Into hearts and minds My graphics are greatAs if you were in the arcadeBut with no vectors I am unwieldlyI cannot be controlled I’m a maverick I am…

  • Home Computer Wars Alpha Mission

    Description The first in a series of classic style shooter games in which you attempt to change history to make the Atari 800 the dominate computer system of the 80’s…by force.

  • Retro Blaster RC1 is complete!

    Retro Blaster  release candidate 1.0 is ready to play. All of my changes in the last few hours have had to do with speed and playability. The game still slows a little (a lot on some older machines) on the levels with the most objects moving, but it’s a HUGE improvement…

  • Retro Blaster Beta 1.0 is up!

    Thanks to everyone who helped me beta test .90. It has taken me a full year to get to this point. When you work full time and have a wife and young son, it is very difficult to find time to make a game. Anyway again, thanks to Steve Fulton,…

  • Retro Blaster Beta Release!

    Jeff sent me a beta release of Retro Blaster and I have posted it.   You can play it right now and start blasting everything in your path.  If only I would tell you what the link is…        

  • Wiicade Releases Wiimote/Flash API!

    The fine people at wiicade have created an API for Flash that will allow programmers to test for ANY button press on the Wiimote!   The A,B,+,-,1,2, and the direction pad are all available, as well as the pointer from the Wiimote.   To test this API, I took one of my unposted…

  • Carded!

    OK, so I was at Target on Friday looking for cheap games in the marked-down section (red price-tags!) and I found a copy of “Big Mutha Trickers 2” for $2.49. Since I have a weakness for trucking games, and $2.49 is my ‘buy it now’ price-point, I had to get…

  • The Asteroids Evolution to Retro Blaster

    My first video game true love was Asteroids. I think the game must have satisfied some internal, mental need to keep things cleaned up. The Sisyphusian nature of this electronic task was enough to make me pour quarter after quarter into the machine in an attempt to just earn one…

  • My First Breakout-Style Game

    Creating Brickbasher (just added a few days ago, but programmed in 2004) was one of my first eye-opening experiences programming small garage games. I have been a fan of Breakout style games since the age of 8 (read about the story here) when I first sampled the classic Atari 2600…

  • Balloon Pop!

    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…

  • Nintendo Wii Flash Development

    So we are just starting to experiment with Flash games designed specifically for the nintendo Wii.  I started this process on Dec. 24th, the day the Wii opera Browser was downloadable. That day I got the first version of Fireworks Blast ready to work on the Wii.   Thge first thing I…

  • Haiku: Breakout 2600

    Breakout 2600   Hypnotic death notes Each block wails an 8-bit tone Blinks out then silence   Burrow A Hole Through Your color-banded shield Watch ball go ape-crap   Difficulty B Paddle too tiny. Back to Difficulty A   One last little block Yes! I cleared level two What? No…

  • A different approach to path finding.

    I spent the last week working on jStar. After researching and working with a* for the last few days, I came to the conclusion that while very powerful, it was slow and overkill for my arcade-adventure, shoot the robots game. Also, since the player is constantly moving, the recalculations using…

  • Path finding…sucks!

    Ok, so I can count all of my previous experience programming path finding algorithms on two fingers. The first was in high school when Steve and I had a very rudimentary computer class instead of typing. One of the basic programming tasks we were asked to perform was to make…

  • Pixel Art, Game Design, Legos, and more

    Even before we owned a computer or game console, Steve and I were designing games. All the way back in 1978 I was borrowing graph paper from my dad and designing pixel art of space ships, baseball games, and what not. Computer graphics design was a brand new field, and…

  • Garage Launched Games!

    Garage Launched Games! If you haven’t read Steve’s first blog entry, you should take it in. It describes how we started making games (or at least how we started to want to make games), and gives you an idea of how little time we really have to make games in…

  • Retro Gone Berserk. Christmas is over time to start again.

    Over that last few days working on the game has been a learning experience and an exercise in frustration. I finally found a halfway decent running animation to use as a template. It came from the 2600 version of Miner 2049er. Having finally found a decent animation, I dug into…

  • Retro Gone Berserk Day One

    I was able to squeeze in a little work on the new game between trips to various shopping centers for Christmas presents. One thing I wanted to research is how collision detection is done in these overhead perspective retro games. I fired up the Atari 800 KRAZY Shootout first to…

  • Retro Blaster is coming

    Right now, Steve is putting the final touches on the technical design for our 8bitrocket.com site. It won’t be spectacular looking, but that is because we want a pretty basic site.  While he is doing that, I am finishing up my latest game called Retro Blaster. It is basically Asteroids,…

  • Zamboozal Poker Dice PC-DOS (1995)

    The 1995 Version of Zamboozal Poker Dice Written in Borland C++ for DOS.