My new website: Wicked Pissah Games!
For a long while now, I’ve been considering where to go next in my Flash career. Some of the very early goals I had when I started with Flash were to get a full time job doing Flash, and to be in the New Masters of Flash book. Well, I’m working in one of the top companies doing Flash (Brightcove), and in addition to New Masters, I’ve written or contributed to about eleven other books, a few of which were best sellers. I’ve won awards, done high profile work, traveled around the world for free, speaking at conferences, started a user group, etc., etc. The point here isn’t to brag, but to say that you get to a point where you’ve done what you set out to do, and then some, and you say to yourself, “OK, self, now what?”
For quite a while, probably the last couple of years, I’ve been asking myself that, and have not had a really satisfying answer. Part of my struggle has been with the inception and popularity of Flex. Don’t get me wrong, Flex is great. But I haven’t really seen myself becoming a Flex developer. The idea of making Flex applications day in and day out is, for me, BORING!!! Ooooh… buttons, data grids, HBoxes! 😉 I mean, it’s fantastic that you can build an app in Flex SO easily, and put it on the web. And AIR compounds that fantasticalness. But building those kinds of apps is NOT why I got into Flash. Laying out components and writing cell renderers is NOT what had me freaking out excited back in 1999. It was MAKING THINGS MOVE! It was drawing some shape on stage, converting it to a movie clip, and puking up a big wad of math code into an onEnterFrame function that made it do all kinds of funky stuff as I sat there grinning stupidly at it. That’s what gave me a “Flash On” (to quote John Grden).
Now, back in those days, it really was pretty close to “puking up a big wad of code”. Since then, I’ve put a huge self-educational effort into learning how to really code. Best practices, architecture, patterns, testing, etc. And while all that DOES somewhat detract from the pure, impromptu, “happy accidents” that come from puking up code, it’s necessary for anything beyond an a simple experiment that serves no purpose but to look pretty. So I don’t regret learning that stuff at all, and will continue to do so.
But still it comes back to the question of what am I going to do with all this knowledge. The answer has been sitting in front of me the whole time – GAMES! They’ve got all the cool physics and math making stuff move around, all the cool interaction, and require all the same serious architecting and best practices that a “real app” needs. I’m not sure why I resisted getting into game development for so long. I’ve done a few games for clients too. It just never clicked. But a couple of months ago I thought it all over and it just made the most sense as a place to put my efforts. So, I started putting together a couple of games, and wow, I was hooked!
So, over the last month, I’ve been developing my first fully developed, end to end game, titled “Gravity Pods”, a physics-based, vector-styled, puzzle-shooter-themed game.
I have a few other ideas in the works as well. So I decided to create a new home for them. Welcome, https://www.wickedpissahgames.com!
The intention is to have the games be free and ad supported. This doesn’t mean that I’ll be quitting my job, taking down BIT-101, or anything drastic like that. But, I’m enjoying making the games, and if people can enjoy them, and I can make a few bucks from them, fantastic.
So there you have it. Wicked Pissah Games. Play the first game, Gravity Pods, enjoy it, and digg it if you like it. There’s a button to do so on the game’s launch page. Thanks!