No sooner has Brian and I finished off Haku, we’re looking forward to our next big thing.
Enter Project: Grande
This project is a bit unique for us, as we have no deadline or contest in mind. It’s all about aiming bigger than before, with a stronger story and pushing the limits in Flash.
We’ve spent about 2 months so far just concepting and experimenting, trying to find that winning idea to run with. I’m not going to give out many specifics yet, but we’re pretty sure we’ll be leveraging the Box2D engine. For a bit of a teaser check out some early concept sketches from Brian:
The results are in and I’m happy to announce that Haku has won a prize in the latest MochiAds contest for best integration of the Freespin3D plugin. There were around 600 entries in the contest and even though not all games had to include the Freespin3D plugin, B and I are pleased with the result.
Check out the contest page and the other winners here
For the press release on Reuters go here
If you’ve not yet given Haku a try, find it here.
Well finally, it’s complete. Our latest game, Haku: Spirit Storm
Two months in the making, the game centers around Haku, a dragon, and his quest to find his true spirit.
Once again there was a heavy focus on player interaction and immersion, as we strived to achieve an engaging feeling of flight using motion, sound and graphics. The black and white art direction from B plays on the whole good versus evil theme whilst desperately trying to keep processor usage down. As for the coding, nothing too special here, although it does integrate a 3rd party plugin named FreeSpin3D which, you guessed it, handles the 3D models for the body segments. The motion of the dragon was my proudest break-through, with a combination of a chain setup and an animated sine wave allowing Haku to animate smoothly and seamlessly between turns and idle movement.
Check it out
There’s been some radio silence on the blog but Brian and I been tapping away on a top secret project, codename: Haku
I won’t reveal too much, just that it’s interactive and set to be some of our best work yet.
Well 1,000,271 to be exact. The ad requests occur once or twice while the game is loading.
What that roughly translates to is the game has been downloaded at least 500,000 times which doesn’t include multiple plays from the one download or sites that have blocked the MochiAds service.
This is a graphic representation of ‘Flock theory,’ that is, the theory of how birds interact and fly together in a flock. The theory I followed was the Boids theory, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986. This theory follows three main rules:
- The biods fly towards the center of the flock’s mass
- The boids move to avoid each other
- The boids move towards the average velocity of the boids in the flock
If you follow one boid it may seem like they have a death wish with the sharpness of they’re turns, however, we must bear in mind my simulation only uses two dimensions and not three dimensions as is the case with real birds.
Download Source here.
Find out more about Boids here.
