Thanks to everyone who played, rated and commented on Probe Abuse. I've been steadily working on a more complete game taking into account a lot of the feedback that I've received. One comment that showed up a couple times is the request for an HTML5 build. Apparently Flash isn't the preferred delivery method anymore :smile:

My engine, Haxeflixel, does output to HTML5 with some limitations. One of the limitations in my case was the lack of blend modes in the HTML5 versions, which means that all my screen fades and transitions weren't working. "That's no good", I thought to myself. "I'm going to work around this engine limitation". So I looked for some other methods that would work (fade in a big black rectangle the size of the screen, swipe the camera, etc) but I finally decided that I was going to do the other thing that I've been meaning to and use shaders.

Lime and OpenFL (the tech HaxeFlixel is built on) support shaders using OpenGL in their latest iterations, but Haxeflixel needs some major changes before they will be fully compliant. They are part way there though and so I downloaded the demo, wrote a few shaders and got them running in the engine.

In the game, the probes get scanned and any upgrades they possess become part of any future probes. I wanted them to sort of pixelize and fade as they disappear. So I wrote a pixel shader, and got it applied to sprites.

You want to pixel fade an apple? Here's a pixel faded apple! (Imagine it is running at a smooth 60 FPS. The Gif is captured at 33...)

So after all this, I find out that HTML5 OpenGL isn't supported in this version of HaxeFlixel either. :sad: So the transitions will look sweet whenever HaxeFlixel supports OpenFL 6.0.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/39/probe-abuse - You can play the compo version here.