Dozen Day Plans

Before I get to the bulk of this post, I'll just let you know that Classic Light Box has been posted on Blazing Games. I don't know if I would consider this entry as an article, more like an update on the plans for Blazing Games. In particular, I am going to give some heads up details on what I am planning on doing with my Dozen Days series.

At the start of 2008 I was going to use the dozen days project as a monthly game release that would be developed live on the site. Two episodes were developed live on the site, but there seemed to be very little interest in the live aspects of the release. When you add the fact that developing the game live adds addition stress to an already stressful development the lack of interest makes doing the episodes live not worth the effort. More to the point, when I did the second live game, I did so when I was sick and had a really hard time doing it with the easy game taking twice as long to write as it should have. Had there not been a live aspect to the development, I could have simply put off the development by a week or two and done the proper thing by taking the day off.

As regular visitors already know, I am currently spending Sunday afternoon working on Ultimate Retro Project and at the moment development on those episodes are on fire! This means that I am filling up all of my Friday release slots at a rapid rate so don't really need to have any Dozen Days episodes. I have also decided that keeping the source code closed for a game in a day project does not make that much sense and all future releases of Dozen Days episodes will have the source code as part of the release. That being said, for the next three months I am going to be releasing the source code and diaries for the first 6 episodes!

The first six episodes were developed using Flash CS3, which is not the most open source format to use due to the fact that Flash CS3 is an expensive tool. That is why I am going to be making a transition from Flash over to writing pure ActionScript 3 games that can be compiled using the freely available Flex 3 SDK. Vector graphics and animations will probably still be created in Flash CS3 but because those assets are strictly artwork resources it would be easy for somebody to replace them without needing an expensive tool.

Before I make the switch for Dozen Days work (which will happen with the development of the official seventh episode even though technically it is the eighth episode created for Dozen Days of Dice) I am going to first create a different game using the Flex 3 SDK for compiling the game. This game is going to be an updated version of Thirteen Spikes. Obviously, I have great hope that this game will be finished before June 13 for reasons obvious to anybody who owns a calendar.

After June I am hoping to release new episodes of Dozen Days every month or so and will probably have sneak previews of those games available for readers of this blog.