Alan Rawkins

I’m a little late posting this but what can you do. Back in early May I participated in the Toronto Independent Game Jam (TOJAM). The object of the Jam was to program a full game, from scratch, in 3 days, while adhering to a couple of requirements. The requirements in this case were to use an image of a goat on a pole, a sound bite of a Toronto subway car door closing, and to fit the theme of ‘Cheese’. My entry was a game called Happy Goat Lucky.

The Jam itself was a lot of fun. It was pretty cool to see so many talented developers whaling away on their projects at all hours of the day. It was also great to just have three days to do nothing but code.

The quality of the resulting games is pretty amazing. All of them are now available for free online at http://tojam.ca/games_2008/default.asp, so go check them out!

There have been a lot of bug fixes in Dolphin Olympics 2 over the past few days, including some changes to how the game controls and how points are scored. To keep an even playing field, I’m going to reboot the scoreboard soon, probably later on today or tomorrow. Apologies to anyone who has worked hard to get onto the top ten, but I’m sure you can do it again, right?

donationcoder.com have posted the results to their 2006 Accessibility Game Programming Contest. Some really imaginative games were submitted, and it was great to be a part of it. Props to all of the winners, developers, and of course and the contest organizers who put in a lot of work and made it a really fun experience for everyone.

I’ve recently finished up working on an entry for the donationcoder.com Accessibility Game Coding Contest. It’s a switch game, which is a game that has only one input (in this case the left mouse button).

The game is called Wakerider. Steer a boat through a series of checkpoints before you run out of time while keeping your wakeboarder from wiping out.

Click to play!

Personal high scores should be saving properly now in Dolphin Olympics.

It turns out the problems with the scoreboard and page access in Dolphin Olympics were/are due to issues with my hosting provider. I hope to have them resolved soon.

Update: All fixed. The high scores should be working again.

Somehow the game was taken offline again by someone or something other than myself. The high score chart access is also malfunctioning. I am looking into the cause; in the meantime I have uploaded a backup copy of the game. You should be able to play but unable to submit scores to the high score database.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in to let me know about the multiplier bug in Dolphin Olympics. It was officially squashed yesterday evening.

Keith Peters has done up a tutorial on putting together an Actionscript 3 development environment using Flashdevelop, the Flex 2 SDK, and a variety of plugins/tools. It does take a bit of work to set up, but if you are looking for an alternative to using Flex Builder 2 or the command line for learning/working with as3, it’s a great alternative and definitely worth the effort.

The Dolphin Olympics has been updated with the following features:

• Enhanced scoreboard - Player’s can track their own personal scores, and the game now records individual records for a variety of things (longest jump, biggest splash, etc.)
• Revised menu structure
• Minor performance enhancements

Give it a shot!