My first ever flash game woohoo

[hariseldon]

Yeah so this is a shameless plug. Some of you may remember me as hariseldon from the unofficial Minecraft server (in which case please ignore my prior knobbishness, but focus on the gigantic penis that I built there). Anyway, I was bored and thought I'd learn flash, and this was what happened.

http://koalasoftware.co.uk/games/online/flock_off/

It's a little rough around the edges in places and I need to get a working high score table sorted but otherwise it should be a decent crack. It's only 50k-ish so nice and small, won't work your PC too hard.

WHAT IS IT?
You are a panda. A skint panda. Evil giant bees have enslaved the earth and crave the meat of sheep. You are going to herd the sheep to the bees to get coins. Simples. The panda is controlled by clicking where you want him to go (hold the button down). Avoid getting stung as those bees do love a good bit of robbery.

WHAT'S MY HIGH SCORE?
I got to around 6000 but then I suck at my own game.

KNOWN ISSUES:
- On some linux machines the fonts disappear. I fixed it by downloading the latest flash from adobe. No idea why that would cause a problem.

Hope you guys enjoy yourselves, and feel free to suggest improvements or tell me it sucks arse.

[Malawi Frontier Guard]

This doesn't make any sense but it's pretty cool I guess.

Make more.

[Joseph]

This game made little sense but I still enjoyed it :)
I want more games with the skint panda as the protagonist!

[CMaster]

Had a few bugs - first time around, hitting "play" did nothing (needs a preloader? They're really easy to make). After a refresh it worked fine, but at the end it went weird and the play again button didn't work.

Both holding down the mouse to move and clicking the coins to collect made for a kinda weird mechanic. Maybe make the panda have to pick up the coins instead? The sheep also tended to get stacked up along the edge and awkward to get away from them - perhaps the sheep could wander a little?

Anyway, works pretty well and a potentially interesting mechanic involved. Wasn't quite so great that I felt like playing multiple rounds though.

[hariseldon]

Thanks for the feedback so far, especially the specificness (is that a word?) from CMaster (just the kind of info a dev needs!).

- The play button not working.. was the text also missing? That might account for the problem, as I've had a bit of trouble with it not working on my linux box in that way. Still trying to figure out what on earth's causing it. Didn't think to put a pre-loader on a 50k file but perhaps my hosting sucks. I'll look into adding one.
- The coins were a later addition (in the original JQuery version the points were just immediately racked up for a sting). Part of the reasoning behind it was the collection of Sunshine in Plants Vs Zombies, it added a bit of frenetic pace to the thing, and I felt that before that point the game was a little lacking in freneticness (again is that a word?). I'll look into other ways to collect them though, could add to the challenge having the panda do the work if he's also avoiding bees and herding sheep.
- Stacking sheep. Hmm I tried getting around that by having the panda in a larger bounding box than the sheep, such that you could easily herd them away from the edges, obviously not quite enough. The sheep will run away from the panda in the exact 180 degree opposite direction, so if the panda is more often in the middle that might account for it (perhaps I failed to account for likely player behaviour there). I think you're probably right that some wandering would be good (and add to the challenge, perhaps copying the random bee wandering routine (btw in the JQuery version this caused me nightmares, buggers kept running for the corners or going in circles) a bit when they're not being herded. I might also want to reduce the fear zone a little so they spend less time running away.
- Play Again - I could have sworn I removed the button for that (bloody thing kept screwing up, getting the movie reset is proving something of a pig).
- Making Sense - I figured that as games involving bears driving and veloceraptors are often posted here I'd be ok on that score!
- Panda - The original I made in JQuery had a Gazelle, but it didn't feel right. Plus I can't draw for crap, only the panda was really anything vaguely recognisable!

Anyway, lots to chew on, I'll have a think on how I can improve things.

[CMaster]

- The play button not working.. was the text also missing? That might account for the problem, as I've had a bit of trouble with it not working on my linux box in that way. Still trying to figure out what on earth's causing it. Didn't think to put a pre-loader on a 50k file but perhaps my hosting sucks. I'll look into adding one.

Errr, think the text was there. W7 64, Firefox 5.0, Flash version WIN 10,3,181,26 for reference. Hasn't happened again, and the preloader for a file that small can be pretty invisible to the user. It's generally a good idea with everything Flash though.

- The coins were a later addition (in the original JQuery version the points were just immediately racked up for a sting). Part of the reasoning behind it was the collection of Sunshine in Plants Vs Zombies, it added a bit of frenetic pace to the thing, and I felt that before that point the game was a little lacking in freneticness (again is that a word?). I'll look into other ways to collect them though, could add to the challenge having the panda do the work if he's also avoiding bees and herding sheep.

Agreed that the coins are probably necessary to keep the pace and challenge up. I just don't personally like trying to control two things with the same device like that.

- Stacking sheep. Hmm I tried getting around that by having the panda in a larger bounding box than the sheep, such that you could easily herd them away from the edges, obviously not quite enough. The sheep will run away from the panda in the exact 180 degree opposite direction, so if the panda is more often in the middle that might account for it (perhaps I failed to account for likely player behaviour there). I think you're probably right that some wandering would be good (and add to the challenge, perhaps copying the random bee wandering routine (btw in the JQuery version this caused me nightmares, buggers kept running for the corners or going in circles) a bit when they're not being herded. I might also want to reduce the fear zone a little so they spend less time running away.

It's quite possible to get them out of there, but they wind up back at the edges/corners quickly anyway. Smaller fear zone might make it more practical to seperate teh sheep too, rather than herding a big blob of them.


Oh, and we use the word specificity in science. Not sure if its applicable to this kind of thing though.
Hmm, OED says yes:

2. The fact of being specific in character.

[hariseldon]

Actually a fair bit of work went into preventing clumping. Each sheep is given a different (random, within parameters defined by the level) speed and acceleration, which should in theory separate them reasonably well. This is also done with the bees. Might be an idea to have some wobble, ie +-5 degrees random misalignment on their direction of travel.

I'll probably work in a few tweaks over the next few days to fix the main issues (I suspect smaller animals might help as well) and then go off and learn a whole bunch more actionscript. I literally knew none until about 3 days ago (I'm primarily a PHP/SQL/HTML/CSS/JS man) so it's been educational if nothing else! Will definitely post stuff here though, had much more useful feedback (ie what was wrong rather than "it's good/it's ok/it's crap") than I expected, and strangely better than the tigsource forums which I figured would be a really useful place to get feedback.

I'll whack that pre-loader on soon as I learn how (I didn't get that far, just dived right into the coding) and I'm actually pretty much in agreement on having the panda collect the coins as it'll mean more hazard (avoiding the bees).

Btw I now really hate trigonometry! It's not difficult, but it is annoying, especially when dealing with sodding radians. Anyway, off to learn more stuff when I should be sunbathing!

Specificity.. I'll use that, my word of the day :)