NOEXTEHO

I hate Flash. I avoid it as much as possible. I don't mind good uses of it (YouTube, Hulu, some embedded music players, some embedded photo galleries), but by my highly-scientific estimate, there are at least 10,000 examples of bad Flash for every 1 example of good Flash on the internet.

Due in part to this, and in part to never really needing to make anything in Flash, and due in part to not necessarily wanting to learn yet another programming language, and in part to never wanting to have a copy of Adobe Flash/Flex/"whatever they'll change the name to next", I've never bothered to learn it. I've been blissfully ignorant. Even with most decent flash games, the fact that it's in Flash pissed me off.

But then I played Fathom.

Besides being a wonderful conceptual game (perhaps my favorite of the "arty" games), the game engine is excellent. I noticed this first because it didn't suck (unlike most Flash game engines) and then because of just how well it worked. It felt like I was playing a SNES, if a SNES were even awesomer than it already is.

And now the creator of Fathom (Adam Atomic) has released the game engine into the public, all free and open source like. It's called Flixel.

This is why I'm now taking the plunge into Flash programming (specifically Actionscript 3). Mr. Atomic even details how to get your Flash stuff compiling for free, from the command line! Yes! Just what I needed to push me over the edge.

So after spending all day learning some Actionscript, thoroughly dissecting Flixel, and goofing around with the included sample game, the picture below is a screenshot of what I've come up with. Not a game, but merely a stripped-down version of the included game where I've modified various parts of the mechanics (and the engine itself) and level generation and stuff. (I even switched in the Brinstar music from Metroid.)

Nothing pretty, for sure, but oh man...... I envision awesome things coming from it. I don't want you to get your hopes up, but don't be too surprised when I end up making your new favorite Flash game sometime soon.