Friday the 13th

I do not like the code that I wrote and am also considering switching this project to Kotlin as my test project for that language so am going to hold of discussing it this week and instead make an announcement. On Friday the 13^th I will be updating my Spelchan.com site to have a less-ugly look. I will also be posting the first ported Blazing Games title, which will be 13² spikes.

Why that day? After all, doesn’t a horror movie franchise claim that this is an unlucky day? Well, porting games is drudge work and I consider it a horror so what better day than that. I am using Adobe Animate CC for the porting but am thinking that it really is not worth the price so will probably be switching to using direct Create.js code once I finish the games I am porting for the upcoming revision of my Flash Game Development book.

The first few games that I have ported went smoothly being easier to port than I feared yet nowhere near as easy to port as I had hoped. Animate CC converted the vector graphics and tween animations to create.js code for me, but none of the ActionScript was ported over requiring me to re-write the code myself in JavaScript. This is not overly hard as most of the Flash API has equivalent Create.js calls, but remembering to put this in front of all class scoped variables was a bit of a pain and often was the cause of any errors in the game. The speed of the games isn’t that great but I am waiting for the WebGL version of Create.js to be officially released before I start playing with that.

Some readers may have noticed that said I have finished porting several games, not just 13² spikes. My plans are to post one port a month for sure and additional posts of games when it is the appropriate occasion, (so yes, there will be a Halloween game). On Wednesdays where I have not made significant progress on my emulator, or at least don’t have new emulator topics to discuss, I will have a short progress report and apologize for my slow development time by posting another game that I ported.

My current porting plans are to finish the 10 games from my Flash book and then look at the poll results on BlazingGames.com to see what bigger series (right now One of those Weeks or Coffee Quest) is more desired then go with one of those larger projects doing smaller holiday games as appropriate. This plan is not set in stone so could change based on factors outside of my control.

Next week I will either be explaining my switch to Kotlin decision or reviewing why I think that my memory emulation code sucks. I do want to play around with emscripten but Kotlin does look like a real interesting language and may actually be a good language for tablet and web development, with work being done on a native compiler to boot. Tough decision ahead for me. See you next week.