Hey, so I just put up a new game on my website called “The Maze of MADNESS.”  Check it out.

The interesting thing about it is that I didn’t create any of the game.  I just created a web based interface for people to create this adventure game on.  I made it for a 48 hour contest this past weekend, and the other contest people have already created 45 rooms, 40 new items, and 152 actions.

It should be interesting to see how long the game lasts before it caves under the weight of itself.  I’m quite interested in trying out user-content games.  So if this even marginally works out, there is a good chance I’ll be doing more in the future.

On another tech note, I used AS3 for the pixel art editor in the game.  I decided on this instead of haxe, because it seemed there was a lot more random bits of information on the internet about AS3.  I managed to get it to work without using a .mxml file.  The tutorial I followed was this.  I also got lots of random snippets from the internet.

-Phil

Watermelons is the ultimate fruit rescue mission game! The local watermelon tree has gone berserk and is producing fresh watermelons at an amazing rate.

You must move your trampoline at high speed in order to save the melons from splattering horribly on the ground. You get ten slip-ups before you lose your job as the Melon Master.

Includes high scores, realistic watermelon sound effects and authentic watermelon bouncing soundtrack.

Watermelons was first created in several hours using python+pygame.  I then ported it to haxe.  And then last of all, I ported it to the iPhone / iPod touch using C code.  I suppose the dev lesson learned is .. rapid prototyping stuff in python is really quick and easy.  So when I port a game from python to something else, I’ve got the whole game concept down, so it’s fairly straight forward to switch to a static language like C.  If say, the problem was not well defined, I suspect it would be harder to implement the games in C first.  (I think my statement here was particularly true for porting Galcon to the iPhone.)

Anyway, check out the flash version, and if you think it’s worth your 0.99, you can get it on the App Store now 🙂

Watermelons was a pygame game made in about 8 hours one evening on the #ludumdare channel. Since then I’ve ported it to flash using haxe. This past weekend I integrated it into the facebook API. You can check the app out here. My server-side high score system was written with PHP.

The integration was somewhat challenging, since I was using a language not supported by facebook (haxe) and my integration involved using flash, which has some restrictions when used within FMBL. To work around these things, I had to embed my flash object within an iframe and then pass high scores back through my main web script in the browser window (instead of as a background request) in order to be able to use all the facebook notification features.

So far (after about 5 days) the app has about 160 users, which isn’t very many. But I suppose it’s not bad for my first shot at writing a facebook app.