I think I’ve made it past the wall. Now I just have to tweak the game to make it challenging and hope that it remains fun to play. But I’m glad that I pushed through. It has been a long journey for me, coming to this point in my life. I’ve always wanted to make computer games since I was a child. But I’ve always had this block that I wasn’t smart enough or good enough to do it. So being on the verge of publishing my first game is an exciting moment for me.

It doesn’t matter that the game is fun or not. I hope it is. And I certainly hope that I place. But I’m just happy to finish and to show people the fruits of my labor – especially because I know I’m only going to get better.

I thought that I had already posted this video, but I had not. This is a video of the late Prof. Randy Pausch, who was one of the inspirations for me to finally get up, and put in the time and lose the sleep to make my dream come true. This is something I believe that every indie developer – that every dreamer – must see.

For me, the line that spoke to me the most was when he said,

“The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!” – Prof. Randy Pausch (1960-2008)

Strike Eagle V 0.9

Now in this version, you can blow away some Mig-29s with your F-15’s vulcan cannon.  The mouse controls the HUD and depressing it will blow them out of the sky.  I’ve also done some more artistic changes to make the sky look more interesting and added a few more to the credits.

Here, I’ve had to do another major compromise.  I plan to have full 3D Mig-29s to display in the Briefing, but for the game itself, the moving backgrounds make it nigh impossible to put on more than a couple Migs on the screen without it starting to noticeably slow down.  So I “cheated” and took screenshots of the Migs to make it more lightweight for Flash to handle.  The plane itself is still a full 3D model, but in order to make the game really go, I had to make the Migs into MovieClips rather than true FreeSpin3D components.

Another thing I wanted was real particles to shoot out of the front of the plane.  But given my time constraints, I cut back on it and made the bullets invisible.  I am planning on coming back and adding missiles for the player to fire to clear the screen.  But right now, my main concern is finishing in less than 2 weeks.

Now, my main concern is gameplay.  This feels a little boring to me.  But perhaps it is because there is no challenge yet.  So my next iteration will include planes flying at the player and launching tracking missiles that forces the player to dodge and aim at the same time.  So hopefully, my next iteration improves the game significantly.

So after this, it’s beefing up the instructions, adding the leaderboards, and hopefully getting in those missile swarms.

Check it out!

As I’m coming close to finishing up this project, I have to admit there have been a number of times I’ve almost completely given up.  The self-doubt in my head has often filled me with thoughts from “You don’t have enough time” to “The game isn’t fun enough” to prevent me from finishing – among some other issues such as some massive deadlines at work that have kept me weekends and late into the evening and some time that friends have needed.  But I cannot thank enough my family who have been supportive of my efforts in completing the game – especially my wife.

Once the contest is over, I will unlock all my private posts about the game as a “post-partum” view of the challenges I have faced in creating the game.  (By the way, I like the term “post-partum” better than “post-mortem.”  It’s more apropos and less morbid.)

Already I feel I’ve had to make a number of compromises to make the game possible within the timeframe I have.  From a technological standpoint, I am very happy with the performance of FreeSpin3D, however, I believe I have pushed it and Flash to its technological limit in terms of processing power and speed for software-only graphical rendering.  I’ve also used a number of mathematical tricks and artistic flair to give the game some polish.  So I am very happy with how the game looks from the artistic standpoint.  So from both an artistic standpoint and a technological standpoint, I am very happy with the results.  Although, from a coding standpoint, I’d love to get a code review with someone to figure out how to reduce the bloat in the Main Document class and to see common strategies and paradigms for creating elegant, modularized scenes and functionality.

My only doubt is gameplay.  “Is this fun?”  And much like most AAA-games, you can have the best technology and some fancy eye-candy graphics, but if the game isn’t fun, then what’s the point?

For now, the point is finishing the game and getting it published.  This is only the beginning and I’ll only get better.