Creating Beat Boost

As an aspiring game designer and developer I find myself reading tons of interviews with other developers, articles by devs and game postmortems. All of these things give wonderful insight into the process of making games and how games evolve over their development cycles. Having recently completed my first game that I’ve put out into the world I thought I’d also contribute an article detailing my initial plans and the process that got me to the finished product. Read on for the full details.
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w00t!

For a week now Boing Boing has had the polls open for voting in the Boing Boing Arcade. It was an excellent competition with quite a few cool games and I was stoked simply to be a part of it. I didn’t end up winning the grand prize, but did placed third — not too shabby for my first (hastily) completed game.

Thanks to everyone who voted, commented and/or emailed me. It was really great to hear everyone’s thoughts about the game. Thanks to Boing Boing for putting on this contest. Finally, thanks to Tettix for donating his music to this competition.

Boing Boing Arcade

Recently I submitted Beat Boost to a games contest on boingboing.net and just this morning I found out I was selected as one of the finalists! So stoked! Check out all the games and vote ( for me ;) ) here.

UPDATE: I ended up taking third place!

Beat Boost: A Fun Music Inspired Game

About a month ago Boing Boing had a call for “games inspired by music”. Contestants need only create a game inspired by chiptunes — a style of music that limits itself to the 8- and 16-bit bleeps and bloops of yore — and submit it for judgement.

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Hand Bound Notebooks

I’m just about finished with my current Moleskine and rather than buy a new one I’ve opted to start creating my own notebooks. Check them out here. If you’d like to commission your own hand bound notebook get in touch with me here

Introducing a Tile Strip Utility for Flixel: Stripper

Stripper is a simple utility for quickly gathering a bunch of images into a precise tile strip for Flixel-base games. Currently an alpha, you can watch a demo of Stripper here and read more + follow progress here.

Defuse World Editor

I recently added a page to this site for Defuse World Editor, a 2D tile-based editor for games. Presently the editor is closely tied to Defuse, a 2D action-puzzle-platformer I’m finishing up for release this summer, but I plan to cut that cord and make it a much more reusable and general purpose level editor.

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Getting SmartFTP? Prepare to be Ripped Off.

I’ve been using SmartFTP for some time now and aside from the too frequent crashing in the middle of an upload it’s a pretty nice FTP client. I like that it supports tabs and is just easy to use effectively. What I most certainly do not like is the system SmartFTP has in place to force users who paid a “one-time” licensing fee to upgrade.
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UPDATE: Adding Build Paths to Flex Projects on Windows 7 64-bit

I recently upgraded to Windows 7 x64 from Windows Vista x64 and I must say I’m loving it! However, much like Vista x64 before it Win7 x64 doesn’t play nice with Flex Builder. I still have issues with blank dialogs (for which I found a work around) but now I have an issue with adding build paths.
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Restoring a Minimized AIR App From the Mac OS Dock

Here’s a link to a post I did over at the BKWLD blog about making AIR apps more seamless on Mac OS.