Here’s a game I made for this Newgrounds contest. It’s an endurance game where you’re trying to escape some mean aliens in a rocket ship, but you will fail. Please give it a shot though and let me know what you think in the comments (or if you’re a Newgrounds member, please rate/review it here). Click the image below to open the game in a lightbox.

Play it at Newgrounds.

I had been prototyping 4 or 5 game designs over the past several months and during that time I hacked out the core code blocks that eventually made it into TLE. The game itself took me about two weeks of off-on work, with the last few days being pretty intense to meet the deadline. I built it using the Flixel framework.

There is absolutely nothing original about this game. It is not going to win awards, though if I won that contest I would be super-stoked. I mean, you fly a rocket ship and dodge asteroids and alien gunfire. That’s it. Remember SkiFree for Windows 3.1? It’s like that, but in space. I didn’t mean for that to happen, it just did. Coincidently, I hated SkiFree as much as I hate TLE.

NOTE: I am aware of the slowdowns. I upgraded Flixel to the latest version at the last minute due to some unforeseen requirements and it’s been bad since then. I’ll look into it when I’ve had more sleep.

This is my most polished module and one that I’m most proud of. It’s a stupid fun module that, when you attach the behavior to an object, will allow users to browse a bar menu full of various drinks whenever they click on the object. It adds an icon of the drink the user selected to their nametag. The icon “drains” over time and eventually goes empty, at which point you should grab another.

Each drink adds a certain amount of “drunkeness points” for every sip (you can tell how many sips you have by the icon on your nametag) to your avatar and over time your avatar will show signs of intoxication, such as bubbles above their heads and the propensity to fall down randomly. You avatar has a drink tolerance that’s determined by your MP level and how many drinks you’ve had in a session.

As of this writing there’s only 4 types of beers to choose from. In the future I’ll be adding a lot more, and not just beer but wines and spirits too. Good stuff.

If you have any other ideas for what drunk effects I should add, let me know. (Note that I can’t touch the avatar graphics so I can’t add new animations. I also can’t currently blur the screen because that would kill performance and it can get annoying.)

Module page. Search the marketplace for “bar system” or my username, “vonwolfehaus”.
Price: 1700 coins.
Configurable options: x and y position that the bar menu appears at when opened

With the opening of Metaplace to the masses, I can finally show off a couple of the projects I’ve built for the platform.

I’m not sure why I made this module but I did. If user sit in a piece of furniture with this behavior attached to it, they’ll be giving a dunce cap with the word “FAIL” on it. They’ll also be scorned by a message from the world owner. If the user tries to leave the chair before their time is up (time is also configurable) they will be kicked from the world.

Module page.
Price: 30 coins.
Configurable variables: timeout length, timeout message (title too), x and y position of the hat.

A new section is up on the projects page where I put classes I’ve written that I think might be useful to others. People seemed to like my post on bitmap text so I released the class I use to do the boring work for me.

Usage:

// Optional format
var format:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
format.font = "Verdana";
format.size = 10;
var bmt:BitmapText = new BitmapText(300, 500, true, format, 12, 100); // only width and height are required
bmt.addText("This is html text, which can't be mixed with regular text.", true); // set last param to false for regular text
this.addChild(bmt.render());

More instructions/explanations are in the class itself.

I’m not sure who came up with the idea first, but the crazy kids at Humanized gave me the inspiration to try this out for myself with jQuery. You can read their rationale for it, but the basic concept is that the “Next page” nav links are pretty ridiculous now considering how easy it is to dynamically load new content with ajax.

Now when you scroll down to view more content, it just loads it up automatically, giving the illusion of endless scrolling and a page of seemingly infinite length.

View the example page.

Also. I’ve updated autoScroll, fixing some stuff. You know how I said I’d release early and often? Turns out that doesn’t work well with me. I get lost in the code and after I finish and upload it, I completely forget to do anything else with it, such as adding a DocType to the page. Heh, yeah, not gonna do that anymore.

Quick suggestion: combining endless pages with my autoscroll script would make the page browsing experience completely seamless and effortless. Try it!

AutoScroll is a quick prototypage to see how well this alternative to the scrollbar would work. There’s an invisible scroll area at the very top and bottom of the page. When the user hovers their mouse over one of the areas it scrolls the page in that direction. Faster scrolling is achieved by moving the mouse deeper into the area.

View the example page.

Welcome to my new digital realm, fresh from the tubes. Not a whole lot here at the moment but I have quite a few projects in the works and will be releasing early and often (or whatever those kids are saying these days).

Cold Constructs is, as you might have guessed by the subtitle up there, a place where I publish stuff I’ve made. What kind of stuff, you might ask. Scripts, plugins, games and other creative works, among many other kinds of things — eventually, anyway.

Most things here are geared towards one central goal: making computers better as best I can. I’ll provide new interface designs, largely as Flash projects, or try to make interesting new game designs (exclusively in Flash).

But this is also my personal site where I like to share my work and get feedback on it. So please don’t be shy with the comment form, and I will always enjoy an email with constructive criticism as well.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you dig the place.