With the nice big experimental writeup complete, I figured we'd get a boost in visitors.

Want to see the results?!!
See inside!!
-=-=-



A nice steady stream of high-days, as opposed to things going instantly back down to the mid 30's like they usually do.
Over the course of the 5 days, and even still today, we're getting a half decent stream. Sure, it's nothing amazing, but it's probably more visitors than we've had here for a while.
It's rather worrying, then, to note that Microbes, on it's own, managed to beat the thing.

What a waste of time that was, then! May as well have just posted another game, and had done with it!
Aw well, hindsight 20/20, what can you do.

As a direct comparison, there's this..


Which, I think says a lot about our whole endeavour.

That's really really depressing!

*sigh*

OK, no matter, lets keep at it.
New year, new rules, new thoughts.
First off, I'm going to take another week off. I know, I know, but I have work to do, and that's more important.
I'm going to spend this week learning Flash. I'm still not sure what I'm going to use. I might use SoThink Quicken, 'cos that's an el'cheapo Flash alternative, with more-or-less complete Flash usability. I might use hAxe, which is a Free text-based Flash compiler.. or I might use Flex, which is the same as hAxe, but since it's made by Adobe, I'd need to install about 1800Gb of shite before I can use it.
Go figure!
Whichever I decide to use, I'll get learning it quick, and hopefully I'll have something ready by next Tuesday. We'll get the ball rolling on Year Two : Flash!

Moving into Flash will of course have it's drawbacks, most importantly that I can't really save things like I used to.
The accumulating Badges that I spent weeks working out, the saved highscores, all that stuff. That's all gotta go!
NOOOoooo!!!!

I'll probably keep the badges in one way, though.
Having played Microbes from scratch a few dozen times, I started to realise that it's a lot of fun if you aim to get ALL the badges in one single play. So, with that in mind, I might leave them in as "Per Play" as opposed to accumulated. That might work.. I'm not sure, but we'll give it a go.
Highscores will have to be worked out differently, probably just using cookies or something. And I'll probably also need to write a whole new Highscore table saving doohickey whilst I'm at it.

Incidentally, if anyone would like to contribute a super-fast php server/mysql database I could make use of, I might need that at some point in the future! Flash games tend to get a bit OTT as far as bandwidth usage is concerned!!

OK, so, getting on with things. 1. Learn Flash, 2. Create intro screen, 3. Make a nice reusable titlescreen, 4. write game #1.. all that, and about 8 days to do it..
...
Yikes!