UP DOWN READY

Hi there! You've probably reached this page from the Freeplay website in search of the elusive 'Up Down Ready' which took Best Design in this year's awards.

UPDATE: Hello! If you've arrived here from StumbleUpon, why not go play the game now on Kongregate! With high scores and EVERYTHING.

The versions of the game that were on this page were hosted on Dropbox. Since the recent spike in traffic, Dropbox has cut off access to my public folder. I will hopefully be migrating this stuff across to an actual server, but the version on Kongregate is the official release.

I'm Delia, the Sword Lady half of Sword Lady and the Viking. You can find my teammate over here. We are third year students in the Games Design course at Griffith University, and Up Down Ready (previously known as Horse) is our first semester project from this year, made using Adam Atomic's free Flixel library.

We entered it in the Freeplay Awards for a lark, and were incredibly surprised and excited to make it to the finals and take away an award. We hope you enjoy playing the game as much as we enjoyed making it!

- Delia

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Don't mind the cobwebs

Eep. It's been quiet here for a while, hasn't it? I am rather shame-faced about it. Still, I have been busy!

It's been a couple of weeks since we 'officially' released Up Down Ready on Kongregate. We got a really good initial reception, and since then we've had:

- 46,000 plays and counting
- an average user rating of 3.5/5 stars
- US$25.40 in ad revenue
- a whole bunch of player feedback to take into consideration
- a number of reviews and shout-outs (even one in Spanish!), all generally positive and some absolutely glowing

See the full list of reviews &c. on our under-construction homepage HERE

We also recently received an email from Greg who is in charge of badges and achievements on Kongregate, suggesting that we do some optimisation and a touch-based control scheme for Up Down Ready to make it suitable for play on Android devices and enter it Kongregate's upcoming Mobile Games Contest.

So this is what I am working on at the moment. I admit to struggling to find time for it with my job taking up a pretty hefty cut of my time. I have spent the past week screwing around with Flash and Flex just trying to get an environment where I could work with the relatively multitouch API in Flash 10.1

Technobabble time: I have been working primarily in Flex Builder 3 for Up Down Ready, which so far has been absolutely fine. However, it doesn't automatically target the latest flash player. I spent a lot of time faffing around in config XML files trying to point the IDE in the right direction and have not thus far had any luck.

I've just installed Flash Builder 4 to see how that goes, as it targets Flash Player 10 by default and should be a little easier to direct to the right versions. I'm hoping to have the touch interface code up and running by Monday to test it on an actual Android phone, at which point I can happily move on to the scaling and display voodoo required to make it not look like rubbish on the phone.

Kids, kidlets, cats and kittens: the lesson here is if someone tells you it's just a matter of adding some extra input and should be easy, the correct response is to suggest how about you add some extra input to THEIR MUM. Shit will invariably take longer than it looks like it should, especially with poorly-documented Adobe products.

I also have some messing around in Musagi to do, to clean up some of our music files and make them able to be looped seamlessly. See here for an explanation of how the Viking is making our .mp3s do this.

Plus there are, as always, bug fixes, user feedback to respond to, and a few little features here and there that will hopefully go in and give us a shot at that delicious US$5000 prize.

In the meantime, go play Up Down Ready! Give us good score if you like it. Maybe drop some Kreds in the tip jar if you REALLY like it.

- remember, the pointy end goes in the other man

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