Piron Games Insider

Recently, I have investigated the opportunity of using Amiga-like tracker music in my games. I really want to make an “anniversary” version of Orbital Decay (woohoo…3 years!) and one of the features is a nice and engaging soundtrack, without bloating the file size. And, apparently, if things go nice and well, Loose Cannon will also have such a soundtrack.

So, I’ve ported the aforementioned library to HaXe. Grab it from the here.

There are  a couple of small bug fixes and there is a speed optimization for the mixing, by using the flash.Memory class (Alchemy bytecodes, bla-bla-bla). The processor load, using the standalone debug Flash player, as seen in Process Explorer tool, is 4%, compared to the AS3 version which does 8% (the machine is an AMD 3200XP with 2Gb RAM running WinXp).

Apparently, NeoArt, the guys that made Flod stuff, will release Flod 4.0 (soon?). Porting, again, will be such a funny task

Update: apparently, according to Nicolas Cannasse, Adobe removed Alchemy opcodes from the latest Flash player (11.2), so if you compile for this target, you have to revert to using Vectors instead of the flash.Memory API.

Update: Loose Cannon Physics has been released. You may play it here.

It’s Loose Cannon, my latest physics puzzle (phuzzle!)  game. Developed during the summer months, it features 30 crazy levels where you can fire the cannon, shoot the musket and jump, plus a level editor to make&share your own puzzles.  Of course, it was coded in HaXe and uses the Box2D physics engine

At the moment, the game is up for bidding on FlashGameLicence, but there isn’t much interest from sponsoring portals for this one. Most likely it will probably be released at the end of October under (my own) Piron Games branding.

Until then, a small teaser, below.

Asteroids spinoff made in ActionScript3 using the Flixel framework and the FlashDevelop IDE. Coming to think of, it’s the first time I use any of those Done in 2 days, showing off the coding “mad skillz” to some guys.

In short, Flixel is cool for quick prototyping, ActionScript sucks (:p), FlashDevelop is very good and useful. While you may expect a step-by-step Flixel tutorial, I don’t have the time to write it.  Even if the coding style is a bit all over the place, I bet you are a smart developer, so you should figure it out. Or simply ask below

Grab the sources from SourceForge. The sources are released under ZLib License, in short, do whatever you feel like with them.

Some of the graphics were done by me (asteroid, bullets, the teleport fx and the explosion fx), so use them freely.  The rest are from all over, I can’t remember the exact authors, most likely they are from Pixel Joint.  Use with care and respect toward their work (that is, replace them with yours).

Sounds were made using the excellent sfxr.

Visit the project page at SourceForge.

And play the game. Just below. Three ships to choose from, each with different powers, use arrow keys to move, Z to fire, X to fire the power (when it’s loaded). Backspace to quit from game to select screen.

The Concept

So it was one day that I’ve got texted and phoned over by my cousin. “Dude, get on Messenger, I’ve got to show you something”. My cousin, Ionel Jinga, is a traditional artist – sculptor -  involved in all kind of crazy art projects, which in the past years got a crush for digital. So he sent me these doodles:

(more…)

Play SuperChicken Battles the Penguin Horde

Do you know why did SuperChicken cross the road? To shoot the invading penguins and save the chicks, of course.

What’s inside

2 heroes, SuperChicken and BabyChicken, each with different superpowers
For each hero, 10 campaign missions where you’ll get a shot at the Penguin King
“Forever Endless” to shoot down increasingly difficult waves of the Penguin Army
“Super Dodgeball” to show your skills at avoiding…the evil
A leaderboard to record your scores forever

How to do it

Collect energy bubbles to upgrade your skills and fire the superpower
Superpower may be fired at any time, as long as you have enough energy
Three control modes (Keys + Mouse, Mouse Only and Reversed Keys+Mouse)
And don’t ask why Reversed Keys. It was easy to code it

Cheats

Yep, we have them. No need to google any further for “SuperChicken prehacked”. During the mission, type ‘god’ to become invincible, ‘tiny’ to shrink your hero, or ‘bat’ to turn it upside down.

Awards

A shooting game would be so empty without them. So yeah, we have those too. Unlock the ten awards to show your shooting skills.

Credits

Karg/Piron Games for Coding, Design and a million other small things
Ionut Jinga for the crazy artwork
Alex Mazilu for additional artwork of the Super Dodgeball.

And just for you…

Because you are or might become a fan of SuperChicken, Piron Games or our other games, here are two wallpapers to spice your desktop.

And, of course, we would be happy to read what you think. Good or bad, throw it down here.

Soon…

So here it is: Invisible Ink. It’s not the epic kind of game and it does require to put a little bit of imagination and thinking at work. Watch the pen move and guess the doodle being drawn in invisible ink.

The game is available in 5 languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish and Romanian.

And, seriously, it’s a coincidence it was released on August 23rd, the former National Day of Romania

A few words about the game:
Idea: Not much of a game-play to be honest, but mostly inspired by a “pillow game” , that kind that usually go with the pillow talk And a bit by Z-Rox.

Production: about 3 weeks, including localizations requested by the primary sponsor (Spil Group).

Graphics: Doodles were traced with Inkscape. Rest of the “graphics” were done with pen on paper and a scanner.

Programming: required attention in two spots. One was the SVG path reader, that was ported to HaXe and tweaked to fit the specifics of the game from the DrawSVG AS3 source. The other was a Bezier curve (adaptive) subdivision algorithm, again ported to HaXe from the works and research of Maxim Shemanarev. If anyone needs the HaXe sources for these two, please ask and I’ll post them.

Licensing: the game was added to FlashGameLicense and after a month and a half, 6 sponsor views, 7/10 editor rating, 5.05/10 developer rating and one bid later, the primary license went to Spil Group.

And for players that are looking for the answers (walkthrough!), below are the answers for the English language. There are more other possible answers (that better/precisely describe the doodle) and give more points, but those…you have to find them out for yourself

Tutorial: circle, square,triangle,x
Easy: A,infinity,heart,star,peace,dollar,pentagram,globe,clover,spade(as in ace of spades),arrow,smile,car,hourglass,house
Normal:N,cube,umbrella,tooth,cog,gem,atom,palm,radiation,lightbulb,arrow,palmtree,communism,music note,footprint
Hard:elephant,paperclip,pear,rabbit,maple leaf (also Canada ),guitar,cherry,rifle,Africa,bird,anchor,gun,mouse,eiffel (tower),snowflake

Oh, and feel free to throw in your doodle suggestions. We might include them in an add-on!

Public stats for Orbital Decay are available here.

Stats are for game impressions: one Mochibot ping before the game is loaded/initialized.

The game was also licensed to Armor Games, where it got 300k+ plays and an unknown number of plays at Big Fish Games (but probably around 100k). All in all, 2.5 million game plays for a game that scored 3.75 at Kongregate, 4.15 at Newgrounds and 7 point something at Armor Games and received overall mixed feelings of awe and anger

Jayisgames reviewed it and their readers voted it  in the top 10 browser shooters of 2009, while later on, the reviewer, Josh, remember it as:

the “battleship” premise is unique and under-utilized in this genre, sporadically popping up in occasional gems like Orbital Decay.

Our players said that it sucked badly enough that it deserved a lengthy bash or that it ruled and is the best game evar. No compromises, love it or hate it. Just as I intended to

Play

Then please share and shout hard.

The Immortal Heroes
Vladislav “DreamRunner” Lobanov
Robert Gonzales
Jon Adamich
Tasselfoot

The Doom Warriors
Traian Pop
Stelian Serban
Stefan ‘Max the Fireraven’ Giurgiu

After lots of months in development and lots of other months laying dormant, waiting for a better fate, Born of Fire, the tower-defense and RPG hybrid, will go live on my portal on April 27th.

This is what’s waiting for you that day:

• 4 classes (demon incarnate, kitsune, shieldmaiden and king);
• 7 characters;
• over 40 spells/abilities to choose from when obliterating your enemies;
• lots of enemies to slay, each with different strengths and weaknesses;
• 4 play modes;
• 40 missions to master, in a journey from the darkest pits of Hells to the gates of the Cloud Citadel;
• a sword&sorcery short story, written as a tribute to the works of Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan.

Show you have the guts to stand against the combined armies of Hells and Heaven. Be here on April 27th!

The developer of sim games and a fantasy game “Bigpoint” (Battlestar Galactica) offers several casual Flash games. Take a look.