Isn’t it just great when you are full of exiting ideas and you hands are itching to get started but then your hands also start to itch because of RSI 
I had that problem a few months ago, but now I’m up and running again and started of with a nice game: http://games.justgreat.nl/games/hoppinpop
I made this game in collaboration with a colleague of mine (Berthjan Achterop / http://www.berthjan.com/)
I started of with the coding of the engine and Berthjan made the design. After applying the design to the game I animated most of the characters to bring it all to live. The result is a “colums”-like game wrapped in a world of weird (but wonderful) creatures 
Enjoy and let me know what you think of it…
PS: here is a nice wallpaper to accompany the game 
Published on
March 25, 2008 in
ActionScript, Graphics and Power-up Media.
Tags: actionscript, as3, design, experiment, fireworks, flash, game, Graphics, terrain generator, tiles.
justGREAT! I start off designing some tiles just for practice and one day later I end up with a neat experiment
I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:
Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080302.htm
The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.
Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).
This week I made some designs for my Mahjong game (read more) and the game is gonna be just great! Here is a little preview of the tiles and the style of the game (I’ll upload more designs later on):
Besides the designs I also needed a nice transition between the background and a map that will be shown somewhere during the game (as some sort of level selection). Because the style is kind of “old” I thought it would be a good idea to make some sort of dissolve transition.
Whaddayaknow; I managed to get a decent result in just a couple of hours.
Despite the fact that I used a perlinNoise and a copyChannel the result runs pretty smooth. Check it out:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080201.htm
To accomplish the dissolve effect I used an alpha mask on the top image (in this case the “map”-image). The mask itself is created by combining a perlinNoise and copyChannel. The perlinNoise creates the randomness and the copyChannel transforms the randomness into a transparent layer.
The size of the mask is half the size of the image and stretched to match the size of the image. This way only a small perlin noise has to be created which increases performance.
Just great; a new week and I have only one spare evening do a little experimenting 
Since my goal was to put up at least one decent experiment a week and since I have little time this week, I decided to upload an experiment that’s almost a year old. It’s an engine for a Mahjong game:
http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp061203.htm
At the time I made the engine I didn’t feel like creating nice graphics so the experiment still looks a bit boring.
Because the engine works fine I thought it would be a wast not to use it, so tonight I created some graphics for the tiles (check them here).
The symbols are taken from a photo of real Mahjong stones. so they should be quite accurate.
The tileset is not 100% complete yet and the current tiles still need a little work on the coloring as well, but I’m sure I’ll finish it somewhere next year
It’s just great to know that after all these years I still got some of my php-programming-skills left. Today I added online highscores to the Bubble Schmubble game using a little php-script which reads and writes the highscores in an xml file. This means you can now compete with your friends or colleagues. Isn’t that justGREAT!?!
I also moved the game to a new location. From now on you can check the game here:
http://games.justgreat.nl/bubbleschmubble/
Besides the online highscore option I also added some sounds (again) and I animated the creatures inside the bubbles a little (quick and dirty).
Last but not least I removed the MochiAd from the game because it was way too annoying and I needed at least a 1000 players a day (!) to make just a little profit from it . Instead of the MochiAd I added normal google-ad-banner though, in the hope it will pay me off some day .
I hope you enjoy playing against each other because your highscore will be visible to everyone who plays the game.
