This just in. My post (see below) caught Adam Saltsman's attention, whom you might know as the creator of
Canabalt and founder of
Flixel, which was the prime inspiration for FlashPunk. We chatted for awhile and it turns out that my own designs for what I wanted to achieve with this are pretty close to some ideas that he's been entertaining as well over the past while.
So, we were thinking about just joining forces and creating a separate, non-library-specific website for the project. So far it would be, as Adam described, "a kind of authoritative flash games design & implementation website". Basically, a one-stop for everything ActionScript, where you could count on finding examples and tutorials for stuff like compiling with Flex, setting up IDEs and working with them, tips and tricks for coding fast and effectively in AS3, and hopefully develop a rad codebase out of it with a set of useful snippets and libraries explained and explored in-depth.
We're still fleshing out the idea, and are both a bit burnt out from coding our nuts off, but I think it's a valid idea and I'm really excited about where we'll take it.
ORIGINAL POST:
I've been kicking around this idea today and I want to know what you guys think.
A more active blog?
Basically, I don't have much to post about on the frontpage, other than the occasional FlashPunk update or new game. I think one thing that could really liven up the site and bring in more traffic was if I turned the newsblog into a more general Flash/coding infoblog as well (I particularly like
Polygonal Labs). That way I'd be able to post several times weekly with new FlashPunk games, changes, and bits of cool code or things I've cooked up or figured out using ActionScript 3.
For example, over the weekend I wrote up a neat script for
calculating the distance between two arbitrarily shaped rectangles. This is used for some useful distance calculating code in Entities, and I was unable to find many really useful solutions over the internet. I really wanted to post this bit of code, because if others like me were searching for it, it'd be awesome for them to discover the site that way and possible drive in a few more regular readers.
So much to share!
I do stuff like this all the time. Those of you who were readers of my
previous site, or hang out at
TIGSource forums, probably know that I am also big on applying Procedural Generation to games, and have become a notable person on the subject in some circles. I love to experiment with new things on the technical side of game dev, and game design is part of my everyday routine, so I almost always have something new to post about or some cool new code snippets to share around.
ActionScript is awesome!
I see ActionScript3 only getting more popular, and find myself constantly Googling things, how to do them, looking up solutions. And every time, I want to
be the site that those searches end up at; the more knowledge about coding I pick up, the more I feel obliged to make picking up and passing that knowledge along easier for others. Also, seeing that this community is becoming a stable one that will probably last quite awhile (even if it never really explodes, which is fine with me), it will make a great base for discussing and breaking down these solutions as more talented coders and developers chime in.
What would we write about?
Here are some various topics that I'd like to cover, which are things that interest me greatly, or things in which I consider myself fairly well-versed:
- Collision, testing out new collision methods, comparing speeds, etc.
- Procedural generation in gaming, how to make games interesting and different ways to experiment with it in Flash games
- Networking and multiplayer. I really want to look more into this and start exploring and testing the power and limits of multiplayer Flash games and seeing how I can apply that to FlashPunk in the future.
- Immersiveness. How to make games more immersive, how to draw players in to your world, how to get their attention immediately and keep it.
- General boring and/or useful data/script stuff. Storing information, working with data, strings, arrays, coming up with useful functions, working with databases, things like that.
- Flash Game Highlights. Doing articles on specific Flash games occasionally that I/we find stand out amongst the crowd. Not just FlashPunk games, but doing breakdowns and determining what makes these games good and learning from them both creatively and technically.
Guest writers!
And that's just me, there'd be more as well: another thing I want to do is include some of my talented AS3-wizard-compatriots into the blog as well. I already talked to
Matt Thorson, who is working on a public level-editor that will be released not too far off, and is willing to do a series of articles regarding level design (his specialty), loading/saving level information, and more particularly working with XML in Flash. Another is
Psysal, who I had the honor of working with in-person at this year's Global Game Jam, but haven't yet talked to about posting occasionally as a guest writer. He's a talented coder though, has been doing so for a lot longer than I. He has taken a special interest in ActionScript lately and will be undoubtedly working with it and discovering new things as the months pass and hopefully will be able to share some of those discoveries with us.
So yeah, hopefully both those guys are interested enough to help me co-write the blog a bit, if I decide to go through with this, and perhaps some of you other guys as well if you've got wicked stuff to share.
What say you?
So yeah, I want your opinion on this. Is there any particular direction you'd like to see the site go? I basically want it to become an essential stop for any ActionScript coder looking to shape-up; but I think to make this interesting and possible, I need to take more action on the blog, and be more personal with the posts and less plain informative. And I wanted to know if you guys liked that idea, or if you just think it's better having the site be FlashPunk stuff and FlashPunk stuff only, meat and potatoes.
Cheers! Sorry for the eye-bleeder, hopefully you guys don't TLDR on me.
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