simon king

I linked this into my blog as it has a nice interface leading into the game.
The interactive swf has educational qualities to it allow the viewer to count and answer on a continued screen.

Below is another game made by the same artist

TriLinks is a strategy puzzler in which the player must connect each set of three (3) same-colored links (“endblobs”) by moving the mouse over adjacent points on the game grid.

Each connecting point represents one step with 100 total steps allowed per level. Moving over blobs of the same color, or over endblobs, do not count against the number of steps remaining.

The catch is that every move of the mouse will change the underlying point to a blob of the currently selected color, even links belonging to previously completed chains thereby ‘breaking’ them. It is all too easy to place blobs where you do not want them, therefore caution and restraint must be exercised throughout the game.

The game cycles through each color in order, repeating if necessary in the event that a chain was broken along the way. Once all endblobs for each color are connected together in an unbroken chain, your score is increased relative to the number of unused steps remaining. Later levels award more points per unused step.

Analysis: As usual, Tonypa’s game aesthetics are exemplary. The lovely piano music, sound effects and the simple, minimalist graphics are all nicely polished and very pleasing, soothing even.

The choice of using a simple mouse-over to draw the blobs, however, is puzzling to me and prone to user error. This is especially true at the very beginning of the game upon clicking the “Play” button. The mouse cursor begins in the middle of the board and the player begins drawing blobs immediately from there.

Why not use a click-and-drag mechanic? I believe that would work (and feel) much better for the player, though it may make the resulting game a bit too easy. In its present form, I find it rather annoying that it places blobs where I do not want them, which takes up valuable steps. Using a mouse-over may make the game more challenging, and yet the discomfort it causes is a detriment to the enjoyment of the game.

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FreeGamesNews: How do you proceed to develop a new game, and what kind of tools do you use?

Tonypa: I use Flash8 currently, but for many years I used Flash5 without upgrading. I loved the speed and simplicity of Flash5 and like with so many other programs newer version only made it slower, more complex and more difficult to use. I still feel for most text editing tasks MS Word 2 was the best version ever made. But Flash8 has many new features which are worth for upgrading now.

I like to keep my Actionscript code out of the source fla in separate as file and because actionscript editor Flash had was not very good, I am used to SciTE|Flash. Sadly it’s not being developed any more so it’s missing new commands, but I am too much used to it. I also use it to edit all txt, xml, php, html etc files.

My main fla usually has preloader and then in main game frame it has include command which then takes the external actionscript file. I tend to put simple Stop() actions inside movie clips, but usually like to keep every piece of code in that as file. Its so much easier to debug and change the code if you keep all the code in one place and not spread all over the frames, movie clips and layers.

For the graphics I use old version of Photoshop. Even for some pixel sprites I have made.
To modify sound wav files I use a free version of WavePad and again, it’s a nice and simple program which can do pretty much everything you need to get the “boings” and “wooshes” right! I can connect a microphone to my computer, record a sound and then edit it in Wavepad until effect sounds are good enough.

full interview with game developer Tonypa on www.freegamesnews.com