Well, it has been far too long since I was comfortably seated behind this desk, writing periodic updates to the site. I suppose that one could classify this post as still fitting the “periodic” tag, though somewhat extended in definition. Suffice to say that it is good to be writing a short blurb once again, and I thought it only fitting to write regarding the past several weeks of absence.

Seldom is absence by choice, and this is no exception to that rule. Work began getting a bit hectic, causing me to lack the time needed to play with some of my AS3 projects, and then I had a 2 week business trip. During the second week of my trip, my wife’s grandfather passed away, so I returned home for a single night before heading out once again – this time towards Alberta, CA. Our family spent the next week traveling through BC and AB, attending his funeral and visiting with family before finally arriving back home. That arrival was a mere two days ago.
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Yes, that’s right: Kotaku will be without the immense blessing of my presence and personality during their E3 Expo coverage in June. In a follow up to yesterday’s post, I wanted to inform my faithful readers that I was not able to snag the victory in the writing contest and claim my role as a game reporter for the week. Am I disappointed? Absolutely. But, I must acknowledge that I was quite encouraged to have made it as far as I did, and I hope that I may possibly find a little recognition out of the whole thing.

Let me once again express my deepest thanks to Kotaku for even presenting such an opportunity as this. I am thrilled to have had any part at all, and – after asking specifically how badly I had lost – when Brian informed me that I actually came in third in their vote, I figured that is nothing to sneeze at. Third place in a contest that determines the next attendee to the pinnacle of video game summits: indeed, not a bad place to be at all. However, the sting of “so close but yet so far away” is definitely there.
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As many of you are probably aware (well, at least the gamers among you), video game news giant Kotaku launched a campaign last week to offer a solitary individual not currently involved in the gaming industry a chance to attend and cover the highly anticipated E3 Expo with them this year. Donning my fanboy facade, I registered for round one of their contest and received word Tuesday that I had been chosen as one of the dozen finalists to participate in the big challenge.
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Well, OK, it’s not much of a Phase 1 – more like Phases 1, 2 and 3 all rolled into one simple demo, but for my purposes, the name will suffice. Many different ideas and techniques have been rolling around in my head for months, and I finally decided to try and find a simple way to implement some of those ideas into a working model; and what better way to do so than a classic shooter?

With flash gaming sites like Kongregate and ArmorGames offering incentives – and even revenue – to developers, I thought it about time to start put something together and just see what comes of it. Obviously, I have a long way to go, but here is a preview of a little application on which I am currently working.
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Embedding fonts has been a bane to me for some time, and I finally spent the time to find both the easiest and most comprehensive way to embed needed fonts into a SWF using AS3 only. As always, I try to keep the demos here as lightweight as possible, and I have tried to keep any code snippets I give free from external resources. In this case, there is a small exception, but it is only the exception of using one of the fonts installed on your own computer.

Basically, we need to understand a couple things about the nature of the embedded font in Actionscript. First, it must be assigned to a String in order to store all the character references. Next, you will quickly find that creating and implementing a TextFormat object to attach the font and styles to the different places in which it will be used is ideal. Finally, keep in mind that attaching several fonts to a single application can significantly increase the file size, so try to consolidate and style for variety as much as possible instead of selecting a boat load of different font faces.
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Well, at the risk of sensory overload today – it’s my blog after all – I decided to post one more version of my map handler. This one adds in the classic mouse hover scroll effect at the edges of the map. I did try to make it a bit more usable, though, by calculating the distance from the edge of the map and accelerating the movement appropriately. So, the closer to the edge you are, the faster the map scrolls. So, to recap, you can use the following methods to move:
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So, a really quick update post here. Upon publishing my previous post, I received some great feedback from gamer friends who thought a good way to improve the interaction would be to allow for dragging the preview marker around to update the viewport in addition to simply clicking. After giving this some thought and suppressing some immediate concerns about the overhead calculations this might take, I have implemented this change and am interested in getting some feedback. Of course, all the other features (like clicking the preview and navigating the map using the A, S, D and W keys). Feedback welcome as always…
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I have been working on some ideas for a TD game that would be both entertaining and original, and I feel that – with the help of a couple friends’ input – I’m on the way to something worth developing. Since I have already put together much of the “guts” for a TD game, I am hoping that I will be able to quickly put together a prototype in my free time. Ideally, once I have a prototype together, I will be able to find a sponsor to pay for development, and I would then be able to focus some solid time on the project, but that is a bit optimistic at this point, since we are still in the baby conceptual stage.

Without giving too much away on my idea, I’m going to try to cover some concepts and specific ideas that I have had to resolve in order to visualize different portions of the interface and interactions. The first thing I realized was, to fully succeed with the idea I want to implement, I would have to be able to support fairly large maps (in some remote cases, massive may be a better term). Having been a long time RTS (Real Time Strategy) player, I decided to take some cues from them and implement a similar map-handling system. Surprisingly, once things started falling into place, it was quite easy to tweak and get working to a satisfactory level.
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A while ago, I wrote a jQuery based slideshow that I shared with some friends, and I ended up getting a pretty good response to it – enough to merit making a full plugin with it. Here is the initial launch of the plugin and project, and I’d love to get any feedback pertaining to usability and additional features.

The intent is to remain very lightweight but flexible, and so far, that seems to be met. Following, you will find links to my Google Code project page as well as a sample script that demos the working slideshow. For any additional questions, please feel free to contact me.

Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/gw-slideshow/
Demo: http://code.guahanweb.com/jquery/demos/gwSlideshow.html

Enjoy!