I just finished off 10 months of work on a Flash game and started it on the sponsorship process earlier this week. You can see the trailer here. This also means – more importantly – that I am free to participate in LD, which I haven’t done in years

Tools I’m using:

haXe/swfmill/SamHaXe – the haXe langage compiles to Flash and several other platforms; combined with swfmill and SamHaXe a full set of swf-building tools is available.

“Fireball” – an open source game engine/framework I’m working on for haXe and Flash. I didn’t get to really use it for my last project other than some experiments, so this is the first “real” test. The main feature is “live updates”, being able to download and use new assets as the game runs for fast iteration during development, and then being able to build solid swfs with preloaders without any additional work(just a different build script). The parts outside of loading assets are much less developed though. Until today the only things really working were basic timing, game startup, input events, FPS monitoring, and some scary unfinished sprite animation code. I banged out text rendering, various timing helpers, and some preliminary tilemap stuff today, and tomorrow I’m planning to put together the necessary asset pipeline to do a simple Roguelike/tile-based game with some sound. I think that’s all I can hope for for this LD48, anything more technically complex and I’d get stuck on collision bugs. You may view Fireball here but I don’t recommend trying it yet, since it’s unfinished and not really documented. Demo will come by Monday 😉

cosmigo Pro Motion – a great pixel art tool, possibly the best.

Acoustica Mixcraft – one of three music programs I may use, this one is my favorite for clip and loop-based composition. Since time is short, I may just bash out a loop-only track in an hour or two.

Renoise – another music program, this one is a tracker and good for creating new loops, sound design or intricate sequences.

Busker – a music program that is made for arrangement and transcription, rather than DAW/sequencing/mixing. If I use this, it’ll be to make a beautiful chord sequence and melody, rather than just “beats.”