I believe it was Chris Crawford who pioneered the ideas of “verbs” in game design. The idea is this, the more verbs in your game design, the more things the player can do. Unfortunately many, many game designs are just “Dodge X and collect Y.” This is especially true of Flash games. If you hold […]
What TO-DO Managing a game project is a daunting task. Contrary to what you may have heard, it’s not simply saying the word “SCRUMM” 4oo times a day. The mechanations of managing a large game project are herculean and would quite frankly grind me to chum in its gears. However, I have a method for […]
Building on my previous post about bow great Collision Detection Kit is, here is something that is not so great. Using HitTestPoint outside of a scrollRect will return false even when it should be true. This is bad news for games using hitTestPoint and scrollRect for camera movement. Jobe Maker has a good explanation.
If you are using Actionscript 3, and rolling your own collision engine, you are missing out on the ease of use of Collision Detection Kit. I am always reticent to use collision packages because they are rarely just packages. More often they require a set workflow and/or asset organization to take advantage of the collisions […]
My previous game, Squiggle Squid, is the best programming I have ever done. I don’t mean that I achieved any amazing programming feats or even that my code is well organized. I simply didn’t make many mistakes. I did very little refactoring or recoding. While this may not seem like a big deal to someone […]
The latest and last addition to the TKO roster is Generator Rex. Generator Rex is a new show from the creators of Ben 10. Generator Rex is like Reptile from Mortal Kombat with a beefy uppercut. We had some extra time to work on him so his special moves are much more visually customized than […]
I was recently invited to speak at a “Game-based Learning” session at US Gaming Arena, the same location we host our Game Developer Meetup. Since I used to have a business (sort of) that did a bit of game-based training, I jumped at the chance. I have some very strong feelings about how to integrate […]
Today we added a new character and a new feature to TKO. Ben 10 Ultimate Alien character Ultimate Humungousaur was added but not everyone will be able to play him. You must register and get 3 wins with any characters to unlock him. Very few users are registering so hopefully this will drive more player […]
Our online fighting game TKO has become a Webby honoree! Being beside such awesome projects as 1066 and eRepublik is an honor. This is old news but since we are on the subject of awards, TKO also won “Best in Class” from the Interactive Media Awards and the promo team making our awesome promotional videos […]
The number one request for TKO was, “I want to play my friends!” so we listened and made it happen. This was an interesting challenge for 2 reasons, 1) We don’t have friends list on CN.com and 2) a majority of our users don’t even register, they play as guest. The answer was to make […]