Aaiko's site

Game Mockup

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 06:25:31 +0000

Not really sure where to post stuff like this. Would have done it on my blog, but yeah, can't really do that anymore. I want to make posts more often and give teasers to what I'm working on, but I feel like I'm spamming the forums. Since I'm basically only showing off a purely visual mockup, I guess I'll post it here.

Anyway, working on a new game, which is basically a fast-paced competitive puzzle/arcade game. Each player is given their own board and they have to destroy blocks to get points. They destroy blocks by selecting groups of blocks by dragging the mouse from one block to another, creating a box. The block in each corner of the box must match in order to destroy the blocks. There's special blocks and actions (like messing with the opponent's board) and other fluff, but that's the basics of the game play.

Here is the mockup so far (very early version). If you've played Startegem, you can probably imagine some of what will be around the edges of the interface. This game and Startegem (and others after it) will be linked together through cross server communications and friends lists and such, so I'm aiming for making them visually flow together as best as possible.

I will update this post with newer versions as they are made.

Edit: Latest version

Hub Referrals

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 06:43:04 +0000

When somebody purchases a BYOND Membership through your hub referral (which I had no idea existed until the other day) how much does the developer get? Is it $5 like the user referral (I think it was $5)? If so, interested in increasing it a bit? Maybe $8?

As I've mentioned in other posts, I'm looking to make a bunch of smaller casual games (10 to 12 this year alone) like my most recent, Startegem. All the games will be linked together with a friends list, chats, and other various things. Making money from them is a problem, though.

I've decided instead of doing individual subs which nobody would buy or would be too cheap to really make money, or shared subs (which might work after a bunch of games done), I'm going to be giving BYOND Members the special benefits. This will hopefully add value to the BYOND Membership (hopefully other developers can do the same). Even though this is likely the least profitable, since most people will likely already have the membership or buy them outside the games (not likely one of these games will get somebody to spend $24, but it might push them over the edge), I figure it would help BYOND quite a bit, which hopefully helps me in turn, now or later down the road.

Casual games aren't played much with the current BYOND community, but the ones I am making are perfectly designed for the Flash client and could become very popular to outsiders and help BYOND bring in a bigger and better community. The games are 100% map/screen objects with unlimited (or however many the server can process) instances of the game able to run on the same server. They're very high quality and very polished, which could show people BYOND can have games that aren't ugly and half finished.

Anyway, back on topic, what are the rewards from getting people to get BYOND Memberships through your hub referrals?

Flash C++ Compiler

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 22:52:58 +0000

This is pretty much for Tom and Lummox JR. Maybe you guys have seen this, I don't know. I know you guys already have a Flash client going and this would require it to be scrapped, but Adobe has a Flash C++ compiler.

It's very expensive and I don't even know if it would work, but a full fledged Dream Seeker in Flash would be very nice. Single player games are very popular with Flash and require no upkeep, they just sit there and make money.

http://gaming.adobe.com/technologies/flascc/

Just wanted to bring it to your attention just in case it's a goldmine waiting to be discovered (maybe a future project). If not, no harm done, maybe somebody will find it useful.

Something I've Been Working On

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 05:51:07 +0000

I've been pretty busy, but I've found some time to work on some fancy artwork. Special thanks to SpriterShawn over at DeviantArt and Thomas over at Primal Arts.

In Depth Preview: Alerts

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:48:20 +0000

A major Teridal update has been in the works for some time now. Included in the update is a complete interface overhaul. All new interfaces will be fully onscreen and polished.

This post will focus on a small portion of the new interface along with new features included with them - alerts.

Alerts are a very important part of the game. They're used as a method to communicate between players and the game to get responses from the player and/or just alert them of information in general.

There are multiple parts to the new alert system. The small message letting the player know about a new alert, the alert box for alerts that don't require immediate attention, the alert box for alerts that do require immediate attention, and the list of alerts themselves.

This post will go through the process of the alerts and show screenshots of how it all looks in-game.

When a player gets a new alert, a message will display in the top right corner of the screen and will flash. If the player is not currently viewing the alerts list, the alerts tab will flash as well.

When viewing the alerts list, alerts that have not been opened yet will flash and alerts that have expired will be blacked out.

An alert box will display in the top right corner of the screen when a user has opened the alert or when an automatically opened alert of some importance is given to the player.

Some alerts require immediate attention from the player and have to be dealt with before they can do anything else.

That's it for alerts. Check back in later as we take an in depth look at other new interfaces and features coming with Teridal's new update.

Good Year Already

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 08:46:24 +0000

A couple hours ago, about 30 minutes after the new year here, I decided to take yet another look at my old corrupted hard drive and attempt to recover the data.

I tossed it in the freezer for an hour or so (fingers still burn from touching it, haha), tried it with an external hard drive cable on multiple computers, tried shaking and banging on it, and much more. Finally I got in and was able to skip a consistency check on the drive and successfully recover my Feval 2.0 work. So 2012 is a great year so far! :)

In other news, I have been doing a lot of work on Teridal's next update. Basically in the process of redoing all the GUI to be quicker, easier to use, look nicer, and work well with BYOND's Flash client (hopefully).

I'll go ahead and post a screenshot showing some of the GUI changes.

The screenshot doesn't show much, but, it's at least something to look at. Hopefully the new update will be ready in a week or two. It's taking much longer than anticipated.

News

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:44:04 +0000

Time for another post to let people know what I am up to, even though majority of the current BYOND community doesn't even know who I am.

Couple months ago I lost a lot of work on Feval 2.0 and some work on Teridal. After that, I started working in Java/Flash. I got a Feval port to the point of being a fully playable online game (without all the extras of the DM Feval), but, working on it just isn't as satisfying for some reason.

Online RPGs seem to be what I really enjoy working on. Instead of starting over in Java/Flash and scrapping 8 years of work, I decided to start working on Teridal again. I got most of everything I lost added back in and started redoing things in the game to make it both perform better and work with BYOND's Flash client. It's not a guarantee I will be using the Flash client for Teridal (depends on how they handle things), but at least the performance improvements will be nice.

Once I am finished with said changes, I will be doing a lot of content updates and just general updates.

So that's what I've been up to the last few days (BYOND related). Hopefully I'll be able to post more about a fairly large up and coming Teridal update soon.

BYOND Client: Flash games vs DS games

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:34:37 +0000

Forum_account wrote:

That's better than how it originally sounded, but I still get the impression that DS will never get certain updates because they'd be hard to implement on the flash client.

In my opinion they should just turn BYOND into a "Flash game maker and portal". Basically DM would be a scripting language that compiles into Flash and the site would just be a Flash game portal. Dream Seeker could easily be replaced with a Flash projector exe of the Flash client.

Of course they'd have to add single player support for it to work out and servers would still need to be run through DD because Flash is nowhere near decent for a server. But, from a business perspective, I think it would be the way to go at this point.

Happenings

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 03:42:34 +0000

Just wanted to let people know what was going on with me and projects I work on.

A couple weeks back my computer crashed and I lost months of work. I lost my latest work on Teridal (but not a whole lot, since I was taking a break from it), and all my Feval 2.0 work. Basically the source I have for Feval is the source from years ago (since I hadn't updated it for a long time before 2.0).

I was pretty upset (and now make backups every night rather than every few months, haha).

Anyway. Sadly, I will not be redoing my Feval 2.0 work in DM. I am now redoing the game in Java/Flash. It's already in a playable state with networking and all, but not quite ready for the public and nowhere near where Feval 2.0 was.

I still plan on having the new version on BYOND (not sure how anybody feels about this), though. There will be a "hollow" DM server that is basically a Dream Seeker window with a browser control that loads the Flash game in it. And of course I'd gladly embed the game into Feval's hub page if BYOND plans on supporting non-DM Flash games (which would be a very smart move) on the hub once BYOND Flash is done. BYOND.com could just be a portal for games, made in DM or not, and DM could just be a nice bonus to help people make games. If not, oh well, but Feval will not be made in DM anymore.

Feval Shop

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:58:04 +0000

Just thought I'd make a quick post about Feval's new shop system.

Acorns are collected in matches and are then used to purchase things in the shop. Currently there is only a select few overlays to purchase, but in the future there will be a lot more to purchase.

The new Feval update is progressing very well! Stay tuned for more information on it.