Abakia Project

The numerous amount of available jump’n'run games on the internet is really overwhelming. You can get them in every taste and color. Starting with 8 bit up to 32 bit, 2D pixel based or full featured 3D. For beginners, intermediates or bad ass pro gamers. From very good ones down to unbeliveable bad ones.

Today I want to tell you about a very special jump’n'run game. It’s a game which is definetly worth to write about. Today I’m talking about Braid. It’s made with lovley painting style graphics and tells a story which differs to the classic mario clone plot (go rescue the princess, kill everything on your way and jump around as much as you can).

But the killer feature of Braid is the smart usage of time manipulation. Yes, you’ve read right! Time manipulation.

All puzzles in this game (consisting of 6 worlds, with round about 5 levels, each level containing 2 or 3 puzzles) have to be solved with backwards time traveling, phantom time activities and spheres which can slow down time.

Now talking as myself as a developer, I’ve to admint that the game has very clever useage of relations between coordinate space and runtime/gametime. There are levels, where the future time is mapped to the positive x-achse of the games coordinate space. I mean how AWESOME is this?

Enough talk! Go and have look by yourself!
If you are interested in the game now, you take the opportunity to buy it for a bout 10 euro at the Playstation Network Store, via Steam for your PC or probably for just a bunch of bucks at the XBox360 Store. In my opinion it’s worth every single cent! Enjoy!

Okay, everybody stay calm now, there’s no reason to panic: I got a new showcase! Yes, it’s a brand new one. Please… ladies and gentlemen, please! Let’s behave like well civilized people. There’s enough for every single one of you.

After my last showcase went broken some months ago, I promised to myself to create new one next (actually THIS) year. You may see the results at http://www.abakia.de/showcase/. I made heavy use of native flash features, as well as of my interactive framework called Monosodium.

So actually this is also a double release party. When I started developing ActionScript Flash in 2008, I also began to collect often used chunks of code and glued them to build a giant tar ball of death. No, that’s not what the framework is actually made of. In late 2009 I throw away the prototype and started to create a better version of the old framework library collection… frankenstein monster.

The rewrite resulted in a lightweight and easy to use flash framework, for creating view based interactive flash apps. There’s probably nothing ground shaking with this framework but it’s my very personal 2 cent and “thank you” to the flash community itself. The project is still lacking some documentation. But I’m working on that as I continue integrating features and refactoring the code. Yes, the framework is still under heavy development. You know the game’s name: commit early, commit often and listen to the audience.
So if you’re interested in the framework, please give me some feedback on that.

Special thanks goes out to Sebastian Deutsch (9elements), for supporting me while developing Monosodium in the early stages.

Some weeks ago I fortunately stumbled over this website. Back then, I was searching for a really good looking colorscheme for my programming editor.

The Vim Colorscheme Test project offers a large preview of different VIM syntax coloring themes. This is might be also interesting for non vim users. Just comfortably browse the previews and choose the theme you want. Then you are able to pick the colors with your weapon of choice (Photoshop or whatever). Just ways better than composing ugly syntax themes by yourself like a colorblind chicken. pick, pick, pick…