GloBounce

Hi there! Since I am delighting in being retarded and not being able to figure out the issue with embedding my .swf into a blog post, you can find the second iteration of the GloBounce here.

If you'd rather have a direct .swf download, you can find that here. Make sure you open that in dedicated Flash player, not just a web browser.

This isn't quite complete, and I may decide to go in a completely different direction with it. For now, though, you can influence the white bouncer's movement based on your mouse position. The bouncer only changes direction when he bounces, so you'll need to plan your movements! The further the mouse is from the bouncer at the time of the bounce, the higher the movement influence. You also control his bounce height this way.

At any time in the air, you can click to initiate a mini-bounce. You can only do this 10 times in the air. Once you hit the floor, your jumps are replenished (man, I should put a meter in there...).

Finally, the point of it - see those white circles? See how many of those you can smack before touching the floor! Some day, I might even have proper scoring in there!

Hope you enjoy.

Bouncin' Along...

If you're interested in seeing the next little experiment in progress, check it out here!

I'd recommend right-clicking and hitting "save as" to ensure that it displays in the proper bounds.

Bonus Post! Collatz Conjecture

I definitely suggest you look at the large version.

Actionscript, of course, is a programming language. And one thing computers and programming languages do much more efficiently than humans is...well...compute! We can use this to our advantage and help display very complex math problems nearly instantly. Flash is a wonderful tool to use in eLearning in that the behind-the-scenes number crunching can easily be reflected graphically.

In this case, I stumbled upon something called the Collatz Conjecture. It's a conjecture that basically says that if you start with an integer, you check to see if it's even or odd. If it's even, divide by 2. If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Repeat that over and over, and you will ALWAYS wind up with a value of 1.

With larger numbers, this process could take quite a while...so...enter Flash! Simply type in a number you want to check (I've limited it to 8 digits) and click "Go!" to quickly see the resulting path to 1.

Dynamically Shifting Menu UPDATED

Large version.

Okay, as promised...I've updated this. I was considering making the image loading dynamic, but I kept running into little pitfalls. Nothing a little more time couldn't have solved, but there are already plenty of fantastic external image loaders out there!

Anywho, I've updated this into a photo gallery with a dynamically sized frame to house the images. To preserve the rounded corners' proportions, I enabled 9-slice scaling guides on the movie clip. If you're not aware of it, next time you create a movie clip, look for the little check box titled "Enable Guides for 9-Slice Scaling. When you go in to modify your movie clip, you'll see some dashed lines that are draggable. Whatever is inside of those guides will scale like you'd expect, but the four corners outside of the guides will NOT! Pretty fantastic when you're enlarging rounded curves, especially if the scaling is not proportionate.

Dynamically Shifting Menu

Large version.

This is the first of a two-stage little doodle I put together. At this point, it is just a grid of menu items that reacts to whatever button you've rolled over. It was a nice little exercise in two-dimensional arrays. Nothing too crazy, but pretty useful for adding a little life to an otherwise ordinary field of buttons. Keep in mind that you can adjust anything about these buttons with the same basic code. You can shift the alpha, the color overlays, size...whatever your little heart desires!

The next step is to turn this into a dynamically loading photo gallery. Why? Why not?

Stay tuned for part 2 in the coming days!

EDIT: Fixed the little odd rollOver issue.

Coming Along...

It's been a little while! Here we have some progress on the BubBomb game shown in the past couple of posts.

What's new?
Well, there's a new scoring mechanism in place that allows for chaining of pops. In other words, if you pop captured enemies in rapid succession without firing off another bubble, your score stacks!
You'll notice a few new visual features, such as a living background, start button, and score feedback messages.
Powerups are in! Well...sort of. Every so often, you'll see a gold enemy. Pop them to release a powerup into the field. Capture and pop the powerup and you'll get....NOTHING! I've not actually put in powerups yet, just a placeholder item. So as of now, powerups don't do squat. Some potential ideas are modifying your bubbles' behavior or offering a bonus multiplier on your chain pops. Any other suggestions?

Finally, and this is a minor fix, I had noticed an occasional bug that occurred when capturing an enemy too close to the edge of the stage. That seems to have been fixed, but be sure to let me know if it happens again!

That's it for now. Keep it funky!

I'm starting to think I have a thing for bubbles...

Large version here.

Alright! As you saw from the last post, I've adapted the bubble catching turret game into another game style. Here you have a free-flying ship controlled with your mouse. Click and hold to drop off a bubble mine, and release to detonate it. Any enemy (represented by gray dots) caught in the expanding bubble will be considered "captured". Once you've got a nice run of them captured, ram them with your spiky body to pop them into oblivion!

Be careful, though...you can catch yourself in your own bubbles! Make sure you're a safe distance away before you detonate or else you'll wind up losing precious seconds...

Note that this is a work in progress, and due to that, we're in a sort of free play mode. You have unlimited ammo, no real goal, and no real way to lose. So have fun and get a feel for it! I plan to turn this into a full-fledged game with multiple enemy types (maybe some will require multiple hits before they're captured...), maybe some powerups, and who knows what else?

Comments are always appreciated.