AndrewMartin

Okay, I finally have something new to show. This is something that I am finally sure I will finish. Mostly because even in the event of ridiculous, unexpected delays, I think this would still be something worth coming back to =]

You should turn up the volume a bit. The sound in the first half of the video was recorded via stereo mix (including the music i happened to be listening to), and the volume was low while i was recording:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbhQs-…

(A high quality option doesn't seem to have appeared, but the small text at the start says "</lie>")

I was planning on doing something like this once i actually had some artwork together, but today I had some viral headache (along with the rest of my family) and was incapable of doing anything more complicated than slapping a lazy video together. I'll update this with new information soonish, but this is it for now =]

Edit: I put Azul Baronis on kongregate, it wasn't stolen.

It was inevitable... I tried to go against everything I stand for and contribute yet another defence game to the cess pit that is the current catalogue of all flash games; I suffered near-fatal boredom less than two days after last posting about it, and have been recovering ever since. They said I'd never walk again, and I honestly could have believed them at the time.

...

Ridiculous exaggerations aside, I should mention that my exams are now over (probably failed, but still over) and so the platform game that I mentioned has started to progress a bit. I'm trying to program a genuine blank slate engine for this one to avoid all the messyness that comes with over-tailored code. Doing it all with external actionscript too. It's just annoying having to lay down so much foundation before you really get into the meat of things; I already have eleven classes, and I only just managed to make the guy run around a bit.

It's good though, it'll give me a tonne of freedom later on for adding in random features. I'm pretty ruthless with gameplay concepts, so I generally add and remove completely random new features right up until the very end of development. For example, the football game I made with pags didn't actually have direct player control until I got bored with polishing the rest of it one day.

Also, it just occurs to me that I don't think I actually ever uploaded that game to deviantArt. I don't really remember why, but if anyone's curious I might put it up =]

Skip to the other bold bit if you're an impatient turd.

Well, now that I have ZERO free time again (thanks to a huge quantity of important exams, and hence a huge quantity of important revision), I have officially chosen the moment to break my lengthy break from flash and have started work on both a chunky new flash game and a smaller side project.

The bigger of the two projects is going to be a platform game with , but this is in very early stages (at my end of things at least), and we're both already taking a short break from it. Once my exams are over with though, I'm thinking that I'll start plowing through it pretty quickly, especially now that I'm getting more used to Actionscript 3 =]

The side-project is just a crappy little defence game I decided to make while I'm taking a break from the more headachish project. Now I know that to anyone who knows me, the idea of me making a flash defence game probably sounds somewhat akin to the pope pissing on the shroud of turin, but I'm only really doing it to familiarise myself more with all of the new stuff in Actionscript 3, and a lot of the stuff i never used in Actionscript 2 that might come in handy now (makes sense to do so before starting a big project). I didn't just pluck the idea out of thin air though; Greg's using his break from the big project to make a defence game too, so I suggested that we both make one and have a contest XD

PikitArs

Anyway, I'm not really very far with it at all yet, but I got bored, so I'm going to post a couple of pictures. I won't explain them, but they might give a hint to the lame gimmick that this particular crappy defence game is going to be based around.

img.photobucket.com/albums/v49…
img.photobucket.com/albums/v49…

That won't look even vaguely like what the final game will look like, it's just what I've been playing around with so far. With a bit of luck, I might actually not forget that this exists in two days time and never touch it again. I get the feeling that one of the many many silly side projects I start might finally see the light of day =]

Well, I should probably run off to bed now. I really do have an obscene quantity of revision to get done in the next few days =<

Just before I go though, I demand that you all go here:

She hasn't got a huge amount up yet cause she only joined today, but I've seen enough of her art to know that she's a total badass, so keep an eye on her

I hate electronically updated timetables. They sound fantastic in principle, but I'm convinced that those with admin privileges will ultimately all go mad with power. I am now sat alone in the computing labs at a time that has "am" written after it (horrific state of affairs, I know), and all to attend a discrete mathematics lecture that mysteriously morphed into an entirely pointless laboratory workshop v.v

I wonder if I'm ever actually going to get into flash again... It keeps almost happening, but then I get distracted by lots of work or something. It's a bit annoying, because I still have tonnes of ideas. Maybe I can start poking at it again in March & April or something (three cheers for a completely random 6-week holiday). I hate just lurking around here without contributing anything. I made some image filters in Java a few days ago for uni though, and then experimented with a load of nonsensical filters of my own design (when I say design, I mean the closest you can come to keyboard mashing while still conforming to a programming language's syntax). Maybe I can filter a few photos I have and post them so people can see, even if just in a journal or something =]

Just thought i should get in a quick update while i have some time. Hopefully i can get in a more lengthy update sometime soon, but for now i'm going to bulletpoint:

• Yes, i've been dead for half a million years. I've still actually been coming here regularly though, just that i've only really had time for lurking.
• Following on from my last journal entry (from freaking august o.O), going to Imperial College London has turned out really well. The fact that it's an insanely good university (now officially 5th best in the world) comes through pretty damn clearly when you're there. It's also completely insane though; i feel like i've covered more than a year's worth of course material in just my first term, and we've had sooo much work to do.
• South Kensington IS an amazing place to live and study. Everywhere you look there's some random famous museum... to the point where there's basically nothing else. That's not so bad though, i technically live on the edge of South Kensington (i have to walk into the middle to get to uni), so there are loads of shops around me.
• I fluked a floor in my hall that happens to be full of a load of totally badass people, so that's nice. They're ace ^.^
• Something else reeeeaaally quite significant happened while i was away. It's not directly related to being at imperial, but it has to do with me being much further south now, and also something to do with the mysterious reason for me not being able to let go of southampton that i mentioned in my last journal entry... Yeah, well i figured it out, and then lots of fantastic YAY things happened, and now i'm not hopelessly depressed anymore. How very unlikely =]