Airport Madness 3

I have been busy coding my next contraption, Airport Madness 3, which is well underway. I sincerely hope to launch Airport Madness 3 by April, but I am hesitant to promise an exact release date. It then becomes a promise that I am either forced to achieve, or likely to miss.

This next version of the Airport Madness series will hopefully be a huge leap in the right direction. I have listened carefully to everyone's suggestions, and shall try to implement most of them. The big feature that AM3 brings to the table is airborne conflicts. In AM2 you had to watch the runways very carefully. Now you must also learn to watch the sky for conflicts.

When it comes to my Air Traffic Control games, I have more than one audience. Most of my customers and followers are not pilots or air traffic controllers, and do not demand anything too heavy from me. Give us more levels. Fine. Give us pilot voices. Fine. However, there is a smaller group of followers who are die-hards. I don't know who they are, or what they do for a living. Quite possibly they are real controllers, or perhaps just very smart individuals, but they really want me to hike things up a notch or two. Like, give us real-world wake turbulence separation requirements. Give us runway cross-overs. How about an ASDE surface detection display and low-visibility operations? Yikes.

Much of this is do-able. However, it must be kept fun. If I make things too realistic, I'm going to scare off those who play my games to fill their coffee break, and don't have time to complete 6 months of ATC training in order to play Airport Madness 3.

Christmas Game: Santa's Landing

Back in September I came up with an idea for a Christmas game that involved driving Santa's sleigh and reindeer through the snowy Christmas Eve skies. At the time it seemed too early to be thinking about Christmas already, but games do require time to assemble.

It is now November 28 and in my opinion, rather late to be launching. Free games like mine only thrive if they can virally spread themselves across the internet to the many thousands of game portals. This takes time, and likely won't happen by December 25. I guess there's always next year.

This idea originated from my desire to do something with "inverse kinematics", the motion of connected objects and how they affect one another, something I learned from a super book by Keith Peters called, "Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move". I initially wanted to try this with a train game, which I still hope to do. The connection of the reindeer to each other and ultimately Santa's sleigh offered a perfect opportunity to apply these phyics to something real. Well, sort of real.

I am always surprised at the amount of code that goes into these projects, and the number of bugs I wind up having to hunt down and fix. What originally looked like a simple weekend project became literally thousands of lines of code. Add in the quest for decent music and graphics, and you wind up with a two-month ordeal.

I don't really know how to rate this game. It likely resides somewhere between "kinda fun" and "pretty damn stupid". I hope that you like it. Your job is to be Santa, riding his sleigh through the snowy skies of Christmas Eve. Control is very, very basic. The up key takes you up, and the down key takes you down. The control point being the lead reindeer, with the rest of the pack obediently following in chain. You must land on as many roofs as you can, while ensuring that the reindeer get plenty of food.

In my world, reindeer eat candy canes. It seemed to me like the most appropriate reindeer food for a Christmas game. After all, how much fun would a Christmas game be if the reindeer were stuck eating lichens and vascular plants? Candy canes rain down from the sky and you must gobble them up often enough to prevent reindeer starvation, which could cost you a life if you are not careful. Each successive level offers something new, such as terrain, obstacles, heavier snow, more rapid energy depletion, and smaller roofs.

Like most of my games, this one has ties to aviation. It was originally to be somewhat like a flight simulator, requiring speed control and a smooth round-out to touchdown. Unfortunately my crack beta team hated it, and so I removed the realistic properties of flight and made it a simple "point it at the roof and land". I sincerely hope you approve of this game, and as usual, feedback is always greatly appreciated.

PLAY IT NOW

Airport Madness 2 - Build 1.8 Available

I have fixed some minor issues in Airport Madness 2 with Build 1.8, which you are now free to play right here on Facebook. If you have purchased the full version and would like the update please email me with your name and email address used for purchase. Here is the email address:

creator@bigfatsimulations.com

The update repairs the following:

DOUBLE CONTROL PANEL: Occasionally more than one control panel would appear leading to undeserved mishaps.

09L DEPARTURES TAXI OVER TOP OF HOLDING AIRPLANES: This has been fixed.

CLOUDS COVER CONTROL PANEL AND GAME INFO: I have told the clouds not to do this anymore :)

FULL VERSION GAME INTENSITY SETTING DOES NOT WORK: This has been fixed.

LANDING LIGHTS OCCASIONALLY DO NOT WORK: This appears to be resolved after rewriting code and beta testing. Since I did not find any problem with the original code, I cannot guarantee that this bug has been removed.

There still exist some issues with Airport Madness 2, but I believe that build 1.8 fixes the game to a reliable state. I hope to shift focus to Airport Madness 3, which I anticipate for April 2010.

Airport Madness 2 Upcoming Build 1.8

I am anticipating the release of Airport Madness 2 Build 1.8 on October 31, 2009. Those who have previously purchased Airport Madness 2 will receive the upgrade for free. Just send me an email indicating proof of purchase (either your transaction number, the email address you provided during purchase, or your name) and you will receive a link at that time.

In no particular order, here are the issues I intend to fix with this release:

• Clouds cover the control panel
• Game performance slows down over extended period of time
• Airport #2 Continuous-Play mode: Intensity setting not functional
• 09L departures occasionally do not hold short of runway
• Double control panel interferes with game play
• Landing lights occasionally do not illuminate
• Score/Landing counter issues in continuous-play mode
• Aircraft "catch" preceeding traffic on runway occasionally
• Taxi status messages show incorrect information

Anything else? Email me!

Will It Fly?

I've dreamt of flying airplanes since I was six years old. I was the kid you'd see running around the school playground with his arms swept back, like a fighter jet. I had an extensive collection of Crayola art, usually only stick-form drawings of the DeHavilland Beaver on floats. Not very inspiring pictures, but in my own young eyes they definitely summarized the magical world of flying.

At that young age, I had pilots all figured out. They had nerves of steel. They feared nothing. They took risks. Behind the RayBan sunglasses and brown leather jackets stood Superman in disguise. Their work was exciting, ranking right up there with Policeman and Fireman. I had decided that one day, I would become a great pilot.

About 20 years back I read an amazingly humorous article describing a game show in which contestants would attempt to takeoff from a short center-stage runway while overloaded with as many prizes as they felt they could safely takeoff with. The show had a sort of 'Price-Is-Right' feel, with contestants scrambling to jam their planes to the roof with BlueRay players and iPhones before their time was up. Some contestants would safely depart, others would crash off the end of the runway.

So anyway, enough rambling. I have created a game based on this concept and have named it Will It Fly?. As a bush pilot of a small aircraft, you must take off with as much cargo and as many passengers as you safely can, while avoiding terrain and obstacles. You earn points by the amount of weight that you safely depart with. However, the more you carry, the worse your aircraft will perform.

How many passengers and how much cargo can you successfully take off with, and still outclimb all obstacles and terrain? This is indeed a good question, and certainly one that many a pilot has asked. This game applies the real-world laws of aviation to a variety of challenging scenarios. Earn points by daring yourself to carry as much as you safely can. I've added the basic environmental variables: wind, temperature, altitude and weight.

As in real life, a headwind can be your ally. Wind reduces the speed at which you travel over ground, but it does not affect climb speed, so a strong headwind can provide pilots with a steep climb angle.


Hot, High, and Heavy. Any combination of these can produce disasterous results. Hot or high atmospheric conditions indicate thin air, which reduces aircraft performance by lengthening the takeoff roll and reducing your climb angle. Too much weight will have the same effect on aircraft performance.

This game is absolutely free (not a shameless demo teaser like Airport Madness). I hope you will all enjoy it. As usual, my email inbox is always open. Fire away with your suggestions, critiques and ideas.

Discussion Forum

I have started a discussion forum on Facebook, and have so far received a number of great ideas for improving my existing games, as well as some solid concepts for my upcoming Airport Madness 3. You can visit the forum here, but must be signed in on Facebook in order to post.

I like using the Facebook environment as my forum platform. Since everyone's comments are connected to their true Facebook identity, the discussion should remain polite and orderly, with no anonymous posters.

Airport Madness 2 on Facebook

After circulating various game portals throughout the internet for the past four months, Airport Madness 2 has finally hit Facebook. It is my intention to make the game a more social experience, beginning with the ability to challenge Facebook friends and compare your high scores. A game is always more fun when you can do it with your friends.

In fact, I believe the Airport Madness concept is begging for "multiplayer", and Facebook is the perfect platform. It would be a tremendous undertaking to promise something like multiplayer for Airport Madness 3, due in early 2010, but it is definitely worth it for me to look at. Please, keep sending me your ideas.

In an effort to circulate Airport Madness, I have developed a kind of Facebook Fan Club. Since you are reading this, I hope that you will join by clicking the Facebook link below.

Airport Madness 2 on Facebook

I hope to see you all on Facebook soon!

Airport Madness 3

I am making initial plans for an Airport Madness 3. I do not offer a release date, but I am thinking somewhere around January 2010 (give or take 3 months). My goal is to make Airport Madness 3 similar in concept to the first 2 games, but a vast improvement. The free version will be the usual teaser, but the full version will be a full-screen game creating much more involvement with the airborne aircraft (i.e. assigning turns, holds, different runways).

At the moment, Airport Madness 3 will contain the following improvements over AM1 and AM2:

• Pilot/Controller voice
  
• A complexity setting (beginner, normal, advanced)
• Real-world rules of runway operation
• A much larger screen for the "full version".
  
• All-new airport layout
  
• Improved graphics
• Emergencies
• Airport vehicles, cars, boats, birds.
  
• Assignable runways
• Different types and speeds
• Special operations, such as training aircraft and balloons.

If you have any suggestions please email me.

Airport Madness 2 - Build 1.8

I am accepting suggestions for Build 1.8 of Airport Madness 2. The intent is to fix any bugs that may exist, and make minor changes that improve game play. If you have observed any glitches in the program, please email me. The issues that I intend to tackle include:

• Aircraft landing lights occasionally do not illuminate;
• Control panels occasionally double-up and overlap; and,
  
• Aircraft occasionally do not hold short of their departure runway.
  

Aside from fixing the minor glitches, I do not plan to add anything further to Airport Madness 2. If you have any suggested additions for the game, I will keep them in mind for Airport Madness 3 which will release at a future date.

Sky Madness Released

Sky Madness is now available, with both free and full versions to suit everyone's budget. I believe Airport Madness fans will really enjoy this. The screenshot is from the full version. Yes, the full version has tornadoes.

The full version also has bad weather, numerous objects that need to be avoided, plus a continuous-play feature, similar to that seen in Airport Madness 2. For just $6.99 it's a bargain.

I sincerely hope you enjoy my latest creation, Sky Madness. As always, I appreciate feedback, so don't hesitate to shoot me an email.

Sky Madness Update

Delays, delays. I had been secretly aiming for an early release of Sky Madness, but unfortunately I've eaten through my time cushion. My expected release date is now August 1.

I am currently working with a small beta testing team to iron out the bugs, in an effort to avoid posting a whole bunch of follow-up builds. I have found a great musician for the soundtrack, and am in the process of inserting the music, making sure to add a mute button this time.

This is going to be a terrific game. I hope that you will love it and decide to support my efforts by purchasing the full version.

Big Fat iPhone?

Some of you may have tried my latest flash game, Bathroom Simulator. Although the game is not a new concept, and certainly not my invention, I enjoyed creating my own version of how I thought the game should be, with my own graphics, sounds and personal rules of bathroom etiquette. Before releasing it as a free flash game, I actually developed the game as an iPhone application using xCode.

Unfortunately, I ran into a major issue when it came time to submit the game to iTunes Connect, the agency used to collect applications from developers like me. My digital certificate was either invalid, or appeared invalid. Digital what? That was my reaction, after investing 20 hours in the project, only to hit a barricade at the very end of the process.

Well, I was not alone. I googled the issue and found others who had a similar experience. Many of whom I spoke with had managed to resolve the issue, but not me. Being new to xCode and iPhone programming, this was extremely frustrating. Now I was investing even more hours trying to resolve an issue that still exists somewhere deep in the guts of my app.

At that very time, Airport Madness 2 was gaining traction. I became busy with adding features, answering emails and squashing bugs, and decided that AM2 was more worthy of my attention than the iPhone app. So I shelved it. One month later, somebody else beat me to it, and their iPhone application became the #1 freebie for over a week. Ouch.

The experience kind of turned me off of iPhone programming, and so I decided to go ahead and launch Bathroom Simulator anyway, as a free online flash game. It's done OK. Since then I've totally embraced Flash, Flex and all things Actionscript. My next game, Sky Madness comes out in a week, not as a continuation of Airport Madness, but more as a close relative of it. I also have two other flash games that I am working on, and have also promised everybody that there will be updated builds for Airport Madness 1 and Airport Madness 2 by the end of August.

I am planning to port these games over to the iPhone in the near future. As I code up these flash games, my Macbook sits lonely on a shelf in my den, beckoning me to flip the lid and fire up xCode. Even my Actionscript hero Keith Peters, who has taught me just about everything I know of Flash through his wonderful books, has moved on to iPhone development. Although I intend to make many more Flash games, it makes sense to put these games on more than one platform, if possible. Maybe I'll develop them for the Android as well.

Upcoming Game: Sky Madness

Airport Madness takes to the skies in my upcoming new game, Sky Madness. I know that I promised a screenshot over a week ago, but what can I say? There is always so much to do. The release date for this game is July 25, 2009. Have a look:



This game obeys my new law, "less realism, more fun". To be a successful game, the fun factor definitely has to be there. Aside from a small die-hard group of ATC simmers out there, the masses just aren't looking for uber-realistic ATC games, so I am trying to come up with ways to simplify and intensify the game experience here.

The idea is to climb or descend all aircraft to their correct flight level without hitting any mountains, blimps, birds, restricted airspace or other aircraft. From my initial beta testing, I can tell you that it is definitely not as easy as it looks. I had intended to have this game ready by now, but had to abandon an original control interface concept that involved UP and DOWN buttons. All that mouse-clicking really sucked away the fun, so I've gone with a click-and-drag concept to reassign flight levels to aircraft.

There will be a free version and a full one. The full version will offer more levels, a continuous-play option, no ads, and will sell for just $4.95. The code is still wet (so to speak) so if you have any suggestions, please email me. I really hope to make another successful game from this 2D sky concept.

Mobile App Blog

For all of you mobile freaks out there, check out Kick Butt Applications, a new mobile application blog. Very humorously written, with good info for those addicted to mobile apps.

It's always a bonus for me when I find a blog that is funny, relevant to my interests, and with a refreshing lack of spelling errors.

kickbuttapplications.blogspot.com

Ball Physics

This is not a tutorial.

There, I said it. I probably just lost a bunch of potential traffic, but hey, at least I am honest. I've faced some real challenges in coding one of my upcoming top-secret games. Actually, the code part is easy. It's the math and physics involved that make me crazy. Last night I came close to looking up my Grade 12 Calculus teacher and asking for assistance. Then at around 12:30am I stumbled upon a great tutorial by Senocular, and it really saved me.

I'm sure you've seen Flash games where a missile gets launched into the air, and it flies a nice smooth arc back to earth. Many of these games are two-dimensional, meaning there is no depth to the scenario. My project involves the launching of various objects into the air, but in a three-dimensional world. When an object in the game is fired "into the screen" it should shrink if you want it to look believable, and it should grow if it gets fired outwards, toward the player's face.

The trouble lies in calculating the proper motion of an object at varying depths. A ball that appears to be traveling fast at close range will appear slow when viewed from a great distance. The trick, as I have learned, is to first realize what the real problem is. You have a three-dimensional scenario that needs to be displayed on a 2-dimensional screen.

In games, information such as speed and direction are stored in digital containers known as variables. A ball that is thrown across the screen is said to have a vx (x speed) and a vy (y speed). In the real world there is a third dimension, depth. Depth is an object's position on the z-axis. When making the necessary conversion from 3D to 2D, it becomes apparent that these 3 dimensions must be made to interrelate. For example, an object up close always appears faster than an object viewed from a great distance. This means that when the z value is large, the vx and vy values must be made smaller. Coding this up is not as simple as plugging a bunch of values into the Pythagorian Theorem. It is messier.

The big trick is to create virtual x, y and z values. Huh? You keep track of an object's position along the three real-world axis: x, y and z. When you convert this real-world scenario to 2D, the z value doesn't really do much except scale the size of the object, and scale the size of the x and y values. When an object is far away it has a large z value, and therefore the object needs to be scaled down to a small size. If the ball is travelling from left to right, it's speed must be scaled down in accordance with it's depth, or distance (or z value, to be technical).

If you have read this far and are not daunted in the slightest, I would highly recommend anything written by Keith Peters. Have a look at his amazing book on the left. He discusses in depth how to make things move with actionscript. Easy enough for beginners, but certainly not boring for experienced coders. He even has a second book, Advanced Actionscript 3.0 Animation which picks up where the first one ends.

This blog is not going to get technical very often. The inner workings of 3D programming is really fascinating, and it has been a lot of fun to learn. Creating this next game of mine has made me feel somewhat like a mad scientist (except I'm not in a creepy underground lab with bats and spiderwebs, I'm usually sitting at Starbucks!).

Upcoming New Game

I am especially psyched about a new game that I am working on. I can't share a lot of details yet unfortunately, but it will be available here on July 10, 2009. I should hopefully have some screenshots up by July 1, 2009.

One of the great difficulties I experienced while programming the Airport Madness series was testing. I would receive an email about some aircraft that wouldn't line up with the runway properly, so then I'd fire up AM2 and wait patiently for 20 minutes until the scenario in question would finally occur. I would perform debugging sessions that lasted hours on end. What a time eater. I could be doing other stuff, like filing my taxes late.

During the creation of Airport Madness 2 I tried to be good about posting details of delays and troublesome bugs. Then finally somebody emailed me and said, "If you spent as much time coding AM2 as you spend writing about coding AM2, it would be done already!". Good advice, however I do intend to post my progress regularly on projects old and new.

Although I am moving forward with some new projects, I have not forgotten the existing ones. Airport Madness 1 is in need of an overhaul. Some bugs still exist, and it could use some of the features included with Airport Madness 2, such as pause and mute. Airport Madness 2 has some minor issues, and there will be a version 1.8 coming out for that in August.

Please don't hesitate to email me if you have any ideas for new or existing games of mine. Many of my ideas come from email that I receive. And if my emails sound a little short and blunt, please don't take it personally. I am trying to answer them all. Thank god for the iPhone.

Bathroom Simulator

Here is a project that I originally published as an iPhone application, and last week decided to distribute it as a Flash game as well.

There are several versions of this urinal game circulating the internet, so admittedly it is not an original concept. Here is my version of this great game idea, and I hope that you enjoy it.

The idea here is to test and improve your public washroom etiquette. You choose the most appropriate stall in a variety of situations. The Bathroom Simulator was inspired by several other games that are based on this concept, but mine has enough "extras" to hopefully get your attention.

The other urinal games are fairly basic, offering the player a variety of situations such as, "There's a guy on the left and a guy on the right, so which urinal will YOU choose?". I've really tried to pimp things up by adding sit-down stalls, busted urinals, and pervert bikers. The game is loaded with graphics, sound effects and music.

I always appreciate fresh ideas from people, so let me know if it is missing anything, or if it could be made better in some way.

Airport Madness 2 Progress

Since I haven't posted any Airport Madness updates since its' release May 2nd, I thought I would bring everyone up to speed on what is happening with the project. In it's first two weeks, I released no less than seven updates, bringing the build number to the latest 1.7.

It was never my intention to release so many new builds so quickly. This action was in response to the many emails I received that brought various bugs to my attention. Airport Madness 2 still has a few minor bugs which I have every intention of fixing in the future. However, I must focus on other projects first, partly due to time constraints and partly because, well, I'm kind of burned out from AM2 and need a change of scenery for a while.

The current build is very functional, with only minor inconveniences such as aircraft landing lights that don't always turn on when they are supposed to. I am keeping a list of such issues, and will likely release another update in August.

"August? Are you kidding me?" August is realistic. Heck, it's already June, and I've got stuff to do. If I get a build out in July I will be the big hero, won't I?