June starts out with a dozen days of dice

The Blazing Games site has been updated and the schedule for the month has now officially been posted. The first game to be posted this month is actually two. Episodes 5 and 6 of the Dozen Days of Dice are being released as open source. More importantly, all future episodes, which will return to a monthly release schedule, will be open source from the outset. The games will be shifting from being developed in Flash CS3 to being developed in Flex and being compilable with the freely available Flex3SDK. The reason for this shift is the simple reasons that a free tool (that is also open source) is available to everyone who wants to use it while Flash CS3+ is an expensive package that not everyone can afford. In addition, Flex is entirely text based which is much nicer to work with for open source projects.

The second week of the month is the release of Thirteen Spikes Unlimited. This game is also going to be released as open source from the onset. It is also going to be developed over more than one release. In fact, the version being released is the 0.2.0 release, and simply consists of the playable unlimited mode of the game. Future releases will add skinable graphics, campaigns, and a construction set. In case you didn't guess, all the future releases have a Friday the 13th release date.

The third game for June is episode 39 of One of those Weeks. It is my last Flash CS3 project, with all my future projects being developed in Flex using Flash for asset and animation.

The final game for June is the classic version of Monster Hunt. It is part of my Ultimate Retro project which is my last Java project. That being said, JavaFX is suppose to be released this fall so it is always possible that I will choose Java for some future projects. CQ Fans should note that CQ5, as it currently stands, is being developed in Flex but that is all I will say about it until this fall.

Java Strikes Back

The Java One conference started today. The big announcement today was the JavaFX platform. This is a set of libraries and a scripting language that will make it much easier to create Rich Internet Applications. While Java is fairly solid for server side work, Java applets have been pretty much put on the back-burner. While it has always been possible to do everything that you can do in Flash using Java, the amount of work required to accomplish the animation effects that could be done in minutes with Flash were quite high. As a result, client side Java has dwindled away. JavaFX is an attempt to reverse this trend and make Java the format for the Internet. This is open source and the alpha can be downloaded from openjfx.dev.java.net if you are interested.

As many people already know, I have been slowly transitioning over from Java to Flash so I found this news really interesting. What does this mean to Blazing Games? In the short term I will continue my work on the existing group of projects that I have announced. When I start new projects in the future, however, JavaFX may be the route I choose. That being said, it is also possible that a future project may be done in Silverlight, but anybody who knows me knows that this is a much lower probability unless cash is involved.

I am actually trying not to start on any new projects for the Blazing Games site until all the existing unfinished projects are finished. Paid work is a separate matter, so if you want to hire me to work on a project for you, let me know. At the moment the Blazing Games projects includes One of those Weeks, Coffee Quest before 4, Coffee Quest 5-6, Coffee Quest Revenge, The Dozen Days Pentalogy (which will include the sequel to Fleet), and the Ultimate Retro Project. I am probably missing a game or two in that list but as you have already figured out it will be a while before I start any new projects for the Blazing Games site.