I enjoy glimpsing behind the scenes to see the sketches that contribute to the development of legendary games. I decided to post the initial sketches we created for the Facebook game I'm coding here at work. This sketch reminds me of the original Pac Man sketches that were posted online a few months ago.

Today I discovered a limitation of Flash AS3. For some reason, the designers of Flash don't allow programmers to refer to embedded movie clips in simple buttons. The "bug" is explained here.

Planning to code till 5:30pm today. Going downtown after work to play bass at the studio. I've been looping Aaliyah's "Let Me Know" and improvising bass lines. So much fun. This 4th of July I'm hitting the beach and listening to some good tunes. I'm presenting the prototype of the Facebook game to the staff at our meeting on Wednesday next week. Still haven't decided on a soundtrack for the demo. I'm leaning toward Air's "La Femme d'Argent."

Rapidly prototyping a Facebook game in Flash has been great fun. I've been refining my method for working out the code and the data models. It's nice to be able to write a ton of code, then chop it down to size when a more elegant design surfaces. It's like programming alchemy :) Back to coding.

Last week my boss mentioned a scavenger hunt she was planning for the students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Rather than have a physical scavenger hunt I suggested that we create a virtual game. The intent of the game is to get the Office of Student Affairs more visible in the UH community. We recently setup a Facebook account for the department and currently have 100 fans.

After thinking about the game over the weekend I decided to bring up the possibility of creating a Facebook game for the students. This morning the project was given the greenlight! I'll be working with our in-house graphic designer Erica Kunihisa and our marketing director Tiffany Higa.

So excited about this project that I started coding right way. 4 hours later and I have nearly 400 lines of code and the core mechanic working. Next steps will be to get the question content, department descriptions, and urls. I'm planning to have the game completed in 1 week. After that, I'm planning to really dig into FBML and work out all the kinks to do stream publishing from Flash. The temp artwork is from my favorite iPhone game of all time, Rolando.

I'm working on making the looks of the two versions of Mathogen identical, or as close as the constraints of the two programming languages will allow. Still haven't found an open source Flash particle engine that's as good as the one in cocos2d. Realizing that I can iterate a design animation much faster in Flash. Today I'm sketching out the pieces of the scenes. I'll cut out the pieces and arrange them on the table. Naming, animation, and cardinality will be more apparent this way. Once I have the model in front of me, I'll start coding it up on the computer in Flash Builder.

A few words about my process: I generally leave a copy of all of my assets on the screen in the .fla at load time -- though they are out of the scene of the movie. At runtime my as3 class initiates the positions and transparencies of each movieclip/button and begins the animation. My main loop has functions that listen for Events and change the state of the game accordingly.

"Art-making is a form of alchemy in a way. Because you are trying to turn the mundane into gold. You're really trying to make gold from nothing." - Yinka Shonibare

Car troubles have forced me to ride the bus for the past week. I'd been looking forward to the opportunity thinking that I might notice new things that my games would benefit from. I thought I might get some reading done on the bus.

Unfortunately, reading on the bus gives me a headache. I played Angry Birds (AB) for the entire hour-long ride and got another headache. Noticed that I most enjoyed the way that AB allows the player to skip the intro and reloading mechanic to get back to the game and try again and again without inconveniencing the player. Reminds me of the select button restart feature in Joe Danger and the quick restart feature in Bionic Commando Rearmed.

I borrowed my girlfriend's Nintendo DS this morning and started looking for her games. The only ones I could find were Cooking Momma and Brain Age. I didn't feel like cooking or playing a educational game so I tossed my copy of "Art as Experience" into my bag and ran to catch the bus. Noting my reaction to playing Cooking Momma or Brain Age led me to think about the incentives for players to start playing Mathogen. The icon rests on your iPhone to be played at any time. What causes the player to click on the Mathogen icon? What propels them to play? What goes through the mind of a Mathogen player when they think about their experience with the game?

This got me thinking about framing devices and the core mechanic of the game. I'd like to focus on creating a frame for the math problems in the game. Thinking about these things on the bus ride home today. Having a deluge of thoughts. Time to break out a pen and paper and work out the consequences of these ideas. Had a great time talking to old friends and making new ones at the Tech Hui Conference this weekend. I always gain new ideas from these events. So happy that my interest in computers and music are proving to be so beneficial. Stay healthy.

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” - Franz Kafka

“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.” - Nikola Tesla

“Without great solitude no serious work is possible.” - Picasso

All quotes were found on Zen Habits.

Just finished giving my talk at the Tech Hui Conference. I promised to post my presentation online. If you attended the talk and want to ask me questions, please email me at david@mathogen.com.

Click here to view the flash presentation.