Progress Update

Our apologies for the lack of posting over the last two weeks. Here's a rundown of what we've been up to.

After working on the press kit a little, we did some more business stuff to make sure we're going to be ok with Uncle Sam and protected from the "unknown unknowns," as it is referred to in The Boondocks. Our lawyer Rush Nigut has helped out a lot with that. Thanks Rush.

Mike has been working on Professor Porpoise: Adjunct Faculty Advisor to the Apocalypse, mainly as a means to continue developing features for Melba Toast. He managed to get a simple scoring and health system in, in addition to spawning ships, one type of which shoots at you. He also implemented some awesome explosions that we've made in the past, which even shake the screen. So PP:AFAA is now made of action-packed awesomeness.

Check out PP:AFAA here (pardon the debug lines). We've decided to treat PP:AFAA as a side project that we're going to pick at from time to time when we need a quick break. It will be developed more and more down the road. Hopefully we'll get to see some of Ted's awesome concepts in action.

An interesting side note about this early version: It's not fully optimized for performance yet, being so early on in development, but, yesterday I found out that Adobe has released a new beta update of Flash Player 9. I was amazed at the performance increase it has with PP:AFAA. Previously, with a few explosions going off at once, my Macbook Pro 2 Ghz Core Duo would drop down to 10fps or so. With the new beta Flash Player, the game doesn't get much below 24fps. I think game developers who are working on Flash games will really be excited when this new version gets released officially. I know I am.

Ted, Greg, and I have been spending much of the last couple weeks concepting, mostly for Dinowaurs. One of these days we'll compile stuff together and maybe post it up for all to see. Greg is now officially in Rome, too. It was sad to see him go, but sometimes you just have to let go. He'll be coming back to the nest soon enough. Be careful out there, Greg!

I've also been learning ActionScript 3.0 from a couple books, including an awesome one by Colin Moock, Essential ActionScript 3.0. His ability to explain the meaning behind things is great. Anyone who has a beginner-level knowledge of programming concepts or higher and is interested in learning about ActionScript 3.0 will really enjoy the book.