This 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…

The 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…

The 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. Here is a…

I’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…

The 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,…

OK, so I actually found a place that has “Health Guards” (Protectos, ass gaskets) in Wisconsin.  However, I’m pretty sure they are new to the region. There was a was a sign above the toilet that read. “Please keep our bathroom clean, use seat protectors“ Now, this might not seem odd at…

This sounds like a rather simple topic. If you have a game application where you can load all of you assets externally at run time, then you will probably have no need for a special preloader and can follow any of the current online tutorials (Google AS3 Preloader and you…

I’m out of town this week in Wisconsin at a web conferenceand I’ve noticied one glaring omission from every rest room I’ve visited:  Protectos. Yes.  There are no Ass Gaskets in Wisconsin.  I suppose everyone is so healthy and germ free out here that they are not required (are they…

Our good friends at Yahoo have a treasure trove of great AS3 UI components (most of them not found in the CS3 release) in their Developer Network. It’s what they call ASTRA or the Actionscript Toolkit for Rich Applications. For AS3, inside CS3, it includes tTee, Menu, Tab Bar, AutoComplete,…

Sometimes you just don’t get to make the game yourself, but you are significantly involved with it enough to get some kind of credit. Below are a list of games I’ve been involved with that I cannot credit as solely my own work, but my contribution was significant enough that…

Best Of Mochi Retro Games: Fluxion http://games.mochiads.com/c/g/fluxion/Fluxion.swf A Great Retro Inspired Game Sponsored By Mochi Ads Instructions: Use the mouse to fly around and left mouse button to fire.

Best of Mochi Retro Games: Space Invaders Defense http://games.mochiads.com/c/g/space-invaders-defence/space%20invaders%20defence.swf A Great Retro Inspired Game Sponsored By Mochi Ads Instructions: A & D or left & right to move click to shoot last as long as you can

I’ve had this conversation periodically with friends and other nerds of all types (rock, video game, etc) and it always ends inconclusively. The conversation starts this way: “When do decades start and end?” The question seems fairly simple at first. A decade lasts from the “01” to the “00” of…

Welcome to our newest blog on our ever-expanding uber media-empire known as 8bitrocket.com. Since much of our “game” sensibility comes from the stuff we played in the 80’s, Jeff and I have decided to start writing about some of the music that we listened to in our formative years. To…

Interactive Crap, Nate (fellow Flash game head, and 8bitrocket friend) has a new series of posts on different rendering tests in AS3. Vector Quality vs. Bitmap Data Quality, Converting Vector to Bitmap Data, and Flash Vector Animation Benchmarks. Game Poetry has a very good entry on time based v. frame…

I don’t know the people who run this site, they aren’t paying me anything to pimp them, but if you have not checked it out, you really should. The name is www.devmaster.net. Felixters from “the kit” (www.flashkit.com) sent me a link to a wonderful article on OOP game design, and…

Tutorial : Creating an Optimized AS3 Game Timer Loop It this tutorial we create what I consider to be my most optimized game timer loop. I will start with the game loop created in my last tutorial and optimize it further. We will add three different optimizations to the game…

Note: I’m converting my Flash game “Spin City” from AS2 to AS3 so it can be re-skinned for another project. I’ve decided to document this activity in a series of tutorials so they might benefit anyone else who is going through the same development process) Sorry, I’ve been away from…

I have started to make a new game, currently called Mission Zeno Fighter. It is going to be a combination of Gravitar, Thrust, Asteroids, and Choplifter (all to various degrees). I started with the code I produced for part 4 of the Atari 7800 Asteroids Tutorial and began making modifications.…

The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. Forrest’s AS3 / Flash Blog has an entry that is right up my alley. It is entitled What is the fastest way to draw pixels in AS3? He found that the fastest method was to call setPixel…

This is by no means an exhaustive survey of the universe of retro Flash games available on the infobaun, but here are some fun, unique takes on some of my favorite old games. Most of these aren’t even recent, but we have to start somewhere. We’ve all seen the games…

Midcoregamer.com has been scouring the web for the past few weeks to locate blogs that are relevant to the Midcore audience.  We found an increasing number of homegrown bloggers that have taken the concept of  the “midcore gamer” (as well has other like designations) to heart and have decided to collect their respective…

Tutorial: Using Flash CS3 and Actionscript 3 to create Atari 7800 Asteroids Part 4 In this 4th and final part we will cover 2 main topics. First, we will use pixel perfect BitmapData collision detection to detect missile and ship collisions with the rocks. And second, we will create a…

The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. Mochiland and James Robinson bring you an absolutely essential article on Marketing Flash Games: The Other Half of the Battle. Please read the entire article, but in summary, Mark suggests that vigorous marketing of your game is…

Flash Game Design Kitchen Nightmares I’ve been watching a lot of the BBC America (plus the sub-par USA Fox version) of Chef Gordon Ramsey’s reality show Kitchen Nightmares. You might know Chef Ramsey from the “foul-mouthed chef” reality contest series Hell’s Kitchen. While that series is the standard by-the-numbers “Survivor…

I did get one pretty good exclusive offer, but I have re-thought my need to sell off my IP and have looked for more places to post the game. Because the game has some tie-in to a holiday that is actually tomorrow, I figured that I should put it up…

The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. Michael Baczynski, on his blog at http://lab.polygonal.de/ds/, has great new set of AS3 Data Structures for game Developers. The structures include: Multi-Dimensional Arrays, Queue, Stack, Tree, Binary Tree, Binary Search, Linked List, Heap and Priority Queue, Graph,…

After I completed my last game, Pumpkin Man, I decided I would not put it up for Exclusive License, but use Mochi Ads and non exclusive licensing to see how well it would do. Also, my sister Mari and I had created our own IP and story for the game…

My Newest Flash game lesson is up over at Mochiland .   This lesson details how to add Mochibot, Mochiads, and Mochi Leaderboards to an AS2 Game.  View the preview below and then go resd the whole thing here: http://mochiland.com/articles/lesson-3-mochiads-mochibot-and-mochiads-leaderboards   Anatomy of a Flash Game: Lesson 3 – MochiAds, MochiBot and…

I’m a pinball fan. there, I’ve said. I love playing actual pinball tables, and I love playing simulated pinball on computers and consoles. My wife and I spent the first two years dating in the early 90s playing a Williams machine named Machine Bride Of Pinbot at the local Pizza…

The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers. Mochiland, always a great place for the Flash Game Developer, has a very good new article on designing thumbnails for games on portals. It discusses using faces, contrasting colors, embellishment (like Atari 2600 cart graphic art) and…