Plan for Brian Richardson (bzztbomb)

February turned out to be a much more productive month for me than January. Here's what I got done:

I passed my Game Mathematics class at the Game Institute. I signed up for this class back in '99 or so and never did anything with it. With my renewed excitement for game development, I decided to finish it up. It's a great refresher on the math I knew and introduced me to the math I needed to know.

I worked on the Flash GUI resource with Thomas Lund. That was quite fun. I fixed the viewport issues that it was having inside Torque. It's based on GameSWF and will just get cooler as GameSWF gets more ActionScript support.

I've also have been working with other people more. I'm helping Tom Feni with his Toons project. I'm working with Nate Watson on his project as well. I've got another one coming up also!

On the personal project front. I have made some progress on my game Fight Like A Girl. It aims to be Mike Tyson's Punchout for the ladies. Here's a current screenshot:



It's currently written in Flash. I'm pondering finding a Flash artist to animate the rest of the game. That seems to slow me down the most. I'm hoping to have a full version of the first fighter/level done very soon. Then I'll link it here and find out what I'm doing wrong so I don't make the same mistakes more than once.

The future of this game is a bit blurry. I want to have a Flash version because I want it to be extremely easy to get people to play it. My plan is to have a downloadable version as well, which would provide customization and other bells and whistles.

There are many options for this:

1. Use the Flash Projector/ActiveX control. Advantages are: Least amount of new work, runs everywhere easily. Disadvantages are: Runs slow, doesn't look "cool". I wanted to Target very low end machines with this. So the projector w/ GDI seemed like a good bet. But it runs really slow on my slow work machines, and I don't like it.

2. Use GameSWF/OpenGL. This raises the bar to OpenGL capable machines. I really wanted to have an extremely low bar for customers to hurdle. I could try to write a software renderer for gameswf. It is set up so you can replace the graphics and sound rendered with new modules. So this might not be too bad. It also doesn't currently support all of the ActionScript I need, so I'd also have to code that.

3. Use Torque2D. I could easily export the graphics with some code+GameSWF. Then recode my game logic in TorqueScript. If I'm already going to require OpenGL w/ GameSWF, then this route maybe the safest approach.

Any suggestions would be appriciated. Please keep in mind that I really want it to be easy for potential customers to give me their money! ;) That's why I'm leaning towards the Flash Projector or a new software renderer in GameSWF.