Gold Mining

Been pondering an idea for a Flash/ActionScript game based on gold mining. Inspired by a recent trip to Goldfield ghost town, the game would be a social application with the object of building up your claim to increase your production of revenue. This image is a render of a few test models to sort of fix in my head the tone and feel of the game. I've been looking into the details and technicalities of Facebook application development, with an eye toward deploying this thing.

Panning map

Been wrapping my head around ActionScript. Got a simple map up and running. Not much to it now, just a repeating dirt tile and a bouncing black ball for a testing map object. You can grab the map with the mouse left button and move the mouse around to pan the map, and that's about it so far. But I'm getting there. You can take a look at the thing here if you are curious.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

An inconvenient truth about myself is that I always reach for more. Witness this blog, which began as an attempt to follow the design and construction of a small game, harking back to old school RPGs. The game has now mushroomed into a fully 3D monstrosity. So far, it looks pretty sweet. Dynamic, 3D lighting, randomly generated and placed geometry, I've re-incorporated the skeletal animation system I built a few years ago for component-based animations allowing paper-doll player equipment setups, etc...

It's gotten out of hand.

I started with a small game because I wanted to focus on making the game, not on building yet another gigantic mass of engine spaghetti code. I can continue for months, if not years, mudging around the code base, making changes, fiddling and farting around... and I'll end up with a pretty engine that falls short of production quality, and nothing in the way of a real game. It's the usual cycle.

So I'm taking a step back, and officially dropping the 3D monstrosity. I wanted a small game, so I'm going back to a small game. Toward that end, I've begun fiddling with ActionScript 3 and the Flex 3 SDK. It's been fun, and the natural limitations of the Flash platform ensure that I won't be ballooning this thing into some huge 3D atrocity for which I lack the time and patience to actually create a usable game for. Plus, I have it in my head to begin developing a series of smaller, casual-style games, perhaps for FaceBook and perhaps for merely standalone.

So pardon me while I regroup, and I'll try to get some updated screenshots of my efforts in place.