Gimme Friction Baby
The first reaction:
The beauty of this game is the un-striking simple idea behind it. When I looked at it for the first time, it didn’t visually appeal to me. When I played it for the first time, I couldn’t make out much of it. After every few random fires, I was shown a ‘Game Over’ message. Such a simple looking game can’t be too complicated, but I was clueless about how to play!
I must admit that the initial learning wasn’t smooth, and that I had spent not less than 20 minutes to understand what is it all about. But once the initial hurdle was overcome, it was too difficult for me to stop playing. I was glued to the game for about a week. It’s still in my all-time favorite list.
Strength:
- Innovative game-play.
- Fun, Repayable and Sticky.
- The Hi-Score next to the current Score builds up a competition with self to perform better every time you restart.
Weakness:
- Confusing in the beginning. Lack of any instruction could put-off many players.
- Slow progression.
About the game:
This game is created by Wouter Visser of The Netherlands. You have to click mouse to shoot orbs from the swinging turret. It will start with a counter 3 and would expand till it touches the boundary or any other previously shot orbs that are lying on screen and reduce its counter from 3, 2, 1…and finally 0 to explode. In the next turn, the last sent orb also adds up to the screen space, thus making it difficult to shoot anywhere without bouncing back to the death line (a dotted line on the bottom). Each time you explode an orb, your score is incremented.
Not sure if it is a bug…just shoot an orb towards extreme Left or Right below the death line to see what happens. You might see a non-reactive, flipped orb created below the death line.
My Rating:
Overall 4.5/5
Copy-righted or Copy-wronged?
X: Can I publish copyrighted materials in my blog?
Y: No, you can’t. But if you can manage to get the permission from author/ publisher, you can.
X: But I am ready to give the author his due credit! I am not selling it or using it for commercial purpose…I am rather helping the author to promote his work!
Y: Nope! The author hasn’t asked you for free ads, has he? Don’t assume he wants this promotion.
X: WTF?! But I liked this poetry so much that I want to put it on my blog!
Y: Well, you are free to include a part of it under fair dealing or fair use as your own view or comment on the authors’ work.
In my previous post, I posted Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden. I was tempted to quote the entire poetry text in my post (with all the due credit to the poet and the publisher), but went to check if I was infringing any copyright unknowingly.
Glad that I did it!
I stumbled upon a site where this poetry text was removed by saying “Unfortunately this poem has been removed from our archives at the insistence of the copyright holder”. I don’t know what insisted the publisher to do so; perhaps because the website was commercial (it carried ads). But then there were several other websites and blogs with the same poetry text, and many of them were supported by google ads etc. I decided to investigate it further.
I found a very interesting explanation about copyright protection. This article is free from legal jargon and is suitable for anyone who wants to get it simple. If you want to understand the issue from a more legal viewpoint, go on and read 10 Big Myths about copyright.
Say, if you were ever to comment on a film or computer game, and if you need uploading a clip/ trailer of it, do you think that you might face any legal problems? No! Not really. Under fair dealing or fair use if we are commenting, criticizing, reviewing, teaching or researching a copyrighted work, we can make use of some limited work like – including a clip form a film while criticizing it or quoting excerpts from any writing etc. We can post game screen shots, videos etc under the same law.
Disclaimer: I am not a legal expert and have a very common man’s perspective on the issue. Copyright is a very complicated and sensitive matter. I am discussing the common dilemma an average bloger faces with copyrighted materials. I am still recovering the shock that I got after learning that, legally “Copyright” and © are same, but both are different from (C). What a headache!
...Lost in thoughts...
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.…
…
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.- W.H. Auden
My first encounter with Stop all the clocks was in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. While watching the recitation, I got into tears. I wished all the clocks stopped for a while so that I could live in the moment. I wanted to touch the grief, feel the pain and sense the despair that the poet has got his inspiration from!
The words of the poetry and the climax of the film chased me for days. It struck me so much that I wanted to preserve every word of it in my heart. I tried to imagine a huge pain in my life and see if I can describe it in words. I couldn’t do anything close to my expectations. To write something poetic, one must have a very delicate balance of a sensitive heart – to feel the pain, a very sharp mind – to minutely observe the environment, and of course, an extraordinary ability to choose beautiful and suitable words. Anything in less or more will make a hollow text.
I couldn’t reprint the entire poetry due to copyright issues. I didn’t know about it much until now. I learned the basics and will share in my next post.
By the way, if you want to read the complete text and about W. H. Auden, do visit the links.
Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8
An excellent book that I would like to suggest to anyone who is keen on learning Action Scripting from the scratch. This gives you a real good introduction and builds a strong foundation. It mentions a few useful game programming tricks and techniques as well. This book illustrates a step-by-step website development project, running through the various chapters progressively implementing the skills that you have learned. For those like me, who don’t intend to know how to make a Flash website, can safely skip this portion and save a considerable amount of time.
However please note that this book title is an older edition on Flash 8 and AS2. You might like to read the newer edition – Foundation-Actionscript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex-FriendsofED. For me the older one works better as I want to explore Flash Lite for mobile devices, which is currently limited to AS2 only. Many developers experienced observed that AS2 is sufficient for making most of the Flash games that are presently online. I feel it should be the scope of the project that should decide the tool you need to develop (AS2 or AS3), but not the other way around.
I skipped the first 2 chapters and read chapter 3-6 (Intro to Flash, Movieclips) over a weekend. I was happy to read something that demystified the concept of Timelines and Movieclips to me. I continued to read chapter 7-8 (Objects and Classes) in next 2-3 days.
Now I had a tough choice before me – should I start coding or finish the rest of the book? I was tempted to code and see something happening before my eyes, but at the same time I wanted to complete it in a single run as coming back to it would be difficult later. Then I had an idea to deal with the uncertainty. I wrote a simple script to roll a dice and let it decide what should I do next? I started with a text-based output and slowly evolved it into a graphic animated dice. I worked and polished it over two weekends before getting back to the book again. I read the next two chapters (reusable code and game sprites) and then decided to not to go any further without starting to implement the knowledge I had gained so far.
Finally, this book is an amazing one to start learning with. I rate it as a MUST-HAVE for everyone into learning AS.
Searching tutorials...
Recently, while searching ActionScript tutorials, I came across HexoSearch, a dedicated ActionScript/ Flex search engine. I compared it with Google, and found that the results were satisfactory. The good part is, unlike Google, here you don’t need to try different keyword combinations to narrow down the search results. And the biggest advantage is that you have an option to select from AS2, AS3 or Flex results – whatever you are looking for.
I tried to search bouncing ball with both the engines. HexoSeach gave me a good long list, with the best answer in top five results. Google too returned me more than ten thousand results, where I had to narrow done the search to get what I was looking for. People who are familiar with Google hacks and tricks can produce wonderful results. I generally use a few things like – bouncing balls + “actionscript” or bouncing balls filetype:fla to refine the search. There are a loads of others that I am not familier with.
Bloggers and site owners can promote their site by registering with them. I haven’t tried it though. Well anyone there?
Learning AS: too many options!
I wanted to learn Actionsctipts for quite some time, but couldn’t decide where to start from? Not that I couldn’t find a way, on the contrary, I found there were too many! I googled and found tons of working sample codes, readymade fla game files, random forums, tutorials, (mostly written by school-kids – some of them are pretty awesome though!) video tutorials (follow-my-steps types)…. I was rather disillusioned with the bulk of information available around, whereas hardly a handful of them were helpful (with due respect to all the people who spend countless hours on making those tutorials, I wish to request them to clearly mention the target audience and difficulty level)!
To add to my despair, I was so busy with my full-time day-time job that I was unable to ensure some dedicated time or commitment towards learning it. I have done programming before, so I knew learning this one would not be a challenge, but I wanted something helps me to kick-start with the gaming techniques.. And I wanted a very no-nonsense and straightforward dive.
Ever heard the word of wisdom – Books are men’s best friend? Online Tutorials and Forums can support learning, but books are amazing for getting a formal start.
I will post about some real good books very soon. I have read a good few books in last few months. Currently I am comparing them.
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