MikeGamin.com

Star Formation: The Game
Last summer Adam Frank and Discover Magazine approached Second Ave. with the idea of creating a game to go along with an article for the Discover Magazine web site. The article is about how stars form. The game was supposed to take this base concept and add some scoring elements to make it fun and addicting. The result is Star Formation: The Game, which I was the primary programmer on. It was designed to target the audience of the Discover Magazine website, specifically trying to include a concept that is easy to understand in a game that can be completed in a relatively short amount of time. We wanted to take this goal and also build in a competitive high score list to encourage players to try the game over and over again. The game consists of three stages of increasing difficulty. Two simple score concepts drive the high score mentality. Firstly, if you use too many novas in one level, additional novas will cost you some points. Second, chaining star creation will work up a points multiplier, allowing for scores to skyrocket. In its first few days of being live it has proven to be quite successful. The high score has gone all the way to 40 thousand. I wrote the code and I can't even break 10 thousand. The reception has been great, including some positive blog posts and Twitter comments. Overall, I'm extremely happy with the players' reactions. Check the game out for yourself below. Star Formation: The Game Adam Frank's Accompanying Article Star Formation: The Game Mirror
Topic(s): programming flash second avenue software
By Pale on March 29, 2009 at 1:18pm EDT	Add Comment

Traject
I just realized I never made a post on here for my Master's thesis project, so now is as good a time as any. Traject is a trajectory based game, in the vein of Tank Wars or Worms. Unlike those games though, it isn't played out in an alternating turn-based fashion. Instead, each player programs their moves ahead of time. Once programmed, the two moves are carried out simultaneously. This makes the players predict the movement of their opponent. The main problem I sought out to explore with the thesis was whether or not an online game can be done in Flash using a simple web based mySQL database instead of a media server or the like. While i was successful in making a playable game, the laborious polling and data transfer process forces any such games into being slow paced turn based affairs. The other highlight of the project is probably the terrain engine. Taking advantage of the then new to Flash BitmapData object, I made a particle system that simulates pouring sand quite well. A demo of just this feature is linked over at my Traject site. Overall, I really learned a lot over the process. The basic concept behind the game had been rolling around in my head for some time. Actually seeing it running is interesting. There are several things I would like to change, and hopefully I'll take it all a step further at some point in the future. Traject
Topic(s): programming flash
By Pale on February 15, 2008 at 9:30pm EST	Add Comment

Christmas with Torque
We had some spare cycles at Second Ave in the months leading up to Christmas. We took advantage of the time with a little R&D. We picked up an indie license of the Torque Game Engine in order to see if it would be of any value to us in future projects. We decided to use the holidays as inspiration and worked toward a simple Santa based game. While it didn't make it out in time for this year, you may just see it next year. :) Overall it was an interesting experience. Torque is inherently a first person shooter engine, so trying to mold it into a third person game with platforming-like controls was an interesting proposition. Overall, I discovered that the engine is quite powerful, especially when you look at how affordable the license is, but the documentation was quite lacking. It was interesting diving into all of the code and I created quite a wish list of aspects that I would like to change. We'll see how much time I get this year to continue playing with it. Here are some random screenshots I took as we were working through it. Some of them are quite comical.
Topic(s): programming torque c/c++ second avenue software
By Pale on January 6, 2008 at 8:05pm EST	Add/View Comments (1)

Biology and Spectrum Science Investigations
From June of 2006 through July of 2007, Second Avenue Software completed one of their largest projects yet. Forty-four science interactives, split evenly among Biology (aimed at tenth grade students) and Spectrum Science (cross discipline aimed at ninth grade students), were created for Holt, Rinehart and Winston. I was the project manager and lead developer of the project for the entire development cycle. This had me involved with everything, from manuscript authoring to final quality assurance and delivering. As lead developer, I also helped architect the engine that drives every interactive and had a hand in some aspect of the individual programming of each. The Second Avenue Software website features ten of the investigations in the portfolio section of the site. Of those ten labs, I was the primary programmer on four of them; Virtual Tour of an Animal Cell, Earthquakes, Manipulating Light, and Radioactive Decay. I've included several screenshots of those four in this post.
Topic(s): programming flash second avenue software
By Pale on January 6, 2008 at 1:38pm EST	Add Comment