The Puki have landed! My latest “experimental” venture was into the land of 3D, which is an area I haven’t explored much in the past. What started with an abstract concept to create a set of 3d classes, and render a view of a tunnel, has blossomed into a full featured 3d game, the first of its kind (first person shooter) that I am aware of in Flash. With help from my team (lots of beta testing, especially since the highscores went in), I have pretty much finished the game, and am releasing it now as a beta. Click any of the screenshots below to play it, and please leave any feedback or bugs in the comments below. This is the first full game we’ve built purely for the fun of it (ie. non-commercial) at gskinner.com, and we’re all excited to hear what you think.

Be sure to read the tips at the beginning of each level, they have some good info. And keep your eyes peeled for easter eggs (a few days late for easter, but there nonetheless).

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I thought I’d give this a quick blog, as it’s now exposed via the FitC awards page anyway. In my spare time over the past little while I’ve been working on a first person shooter in Flash (perhaps the first Flash fps?) using our new set of 3d classes. Considering it started mainly as a technical experiment, it’s looking pretty good, and is actually fun to play (though maybe not as instantly addicting as the 1kb asteroids game). I’m just putting on the finishing touches now, and should be releasing it sometime late next week.

Here’s a screenshot in the interim (scaled down to fit in the blog).

And before anyone asks… glic news coming next week, I promise.

Here’s a super simple panel for Flash MX 2004 that lets you quickly assemble a list of FLAs that you would like to compile as a group. It’s not really a finished product as it doesn’t remember the list after you close the panel, but I thought it might be useful to some people (a couple of my developers are using it on a project right now).

To use:

1. install the MXP and restart Flash

2. open the panel from Window > Other Panels > Publish List

3. open a few FLAs, and click the add one button to add the focused FLA to the list, or click the add all button to add all open FLAs to the publish list.

4. you can remove FLAs by selecting them in the list and clicking the remove button

5. click the publish button to publish all of the FLAs in the list

You can download the publish list panel by clicking here. If this interests you, be sure to check out the much more powerful (but harder to use) batch compiler JSFL I released previously.

Stacey Mulcahy posted on her blog last night asking “Why is _root evil personified“. I posted a bit of a long-winded reply, which I decided to flesh out and re-post here, mainly so that I have my own record of it to point people to when they ask this question (it seems to come up a lot). She also followed up asking the same question about _global, which can be answered in exactly the same manner.
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I’m going to try to post some of my older work on the blog over the next few months, largely for my own archival purposes, but also because I think a lot of my older stuff was kind of fun and worth revisiting. I’ll probably also post a lot of the source code (when I can find it).

Since yesterday I posted a tiny new game, today I thought I’d post a big old game.

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