Hola amigos.

How's it cookin'?

SO, what's new, not so much, mostly I've been working on The Damned first level again, the next chapter in the beat-em-up tutorial 'Weapons' (99% done) and I also rustled up a little Streets of Rage-style fighting game prototype the other night too. Making moves link to other moves when attacking was easier than I thought, and didn't require any complicated methods to achieve.

I'm quite chuffed with the way the revision of the first level of TD (The Damned) is going. In retrospect I can't believe I was prepared to simply let it be at one stage. My thinking was that maybe people would notice it, then the next game would be more popular. Then I noticed some of the effort some of my peers were putting into their games on this http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=717716 thread over at FlashKit and frankly, was inspired to keep pushing the game until I myself am truly satisfied with it. First things first, there's not enough weapons so I decided to chuck an assault rifle into the first level, which is becoming seriously playable now- if I don't say so myself. It was a teeny bit tricky to get the rapid-fire action of the gun done in AS as there is no such thing as a MouseButtonIsHeldDown handler in Flash, and so you have to fiddle around with things like boolean values instead. Also getting the rat-a-tat sound going wasn't as simple as you might think. I broke the sound into a single 'tat' and stuck it on the first keyframe of the firing animation and that works quite well.

Also, I was told by some folks that there should a wider variety of enemies to kill, and so after a lot of trial and error with different types (had ghosts and shit flying over the lake at one point) I decided it might be cool to make a mask-wearing harder version of the lake zombies. Enemies that are slow but take a good and proper mowing down to kill, as opposed to the ones that come at you like Olympic swimmers. On top of this, ammo is now limited and must be collected by shooting the occasional ammo box that pops up through the waves (because they just do that sometimes!), accompanied by my own sexy "AMMO!" voice, audio edited Audicity to sound much cooler.

I also contributed a few minor cosmetic changes, the sliding text boxes used for Rick and Jennifer's speech have been reenvisioned to be more 'antique' and decorated with steel engraving. A flashy extra ammo text box pops up now too. Oh, and the loading screen has been updated.

I'm surprised nobody has guessed what game this is a secret prelude to yet. Hint, Rick, Jennifer? Lots of gore? Masks and things? Certain beat-em-up tutorial on this very site?
Nope, I guess I am old.

Well, all these changes might be for naught, but I'm having fun actually making a game that is becoming more playable by the day. Links on the right-hand side, folks.

p.s.Saw III is awesome. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll say one word to convey a hint to what was my favourite scene, 'pigs'.

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