developed in macromedia flash MX 2004.
art created in photoshop and 3d studio max 6.0
deployed with Flash Jugglor and MDM ZINC

Overview

Mr. Figgles was a complete experiment. I remember thinking it would be next to impossible to create a game in flash MX 2004. Well, a game I would consider a game anyway. It took me close to 6 calendar months to complete and probably close to 300 hours. I didn't know flash, I have some game design experience but it was limited. My strength was art, however most of those hours were obviously spent programming, not creating art ;)

Good

So what was so great about Mr. Figgles? Well, aside from the pride of actually completing a game on my spare time, I found it pretty fun. Was it the most amazing game ever? No, but it was and still is different from anything else you will find out there. My goal was to keep it simple and I did just that. Maybe to a fault, nonetheless I completed it and still enjoy playing with it to this day.

I learned EVERYTHING with Mr. Figgles. Save Game, Load Game, High Scores, Level Selection and play balancing, Character Profiles as well as the ins and outs of Movie Clips, actionscript and event triggers in Flash. Everything I know today about flash, comes from Mr. Figgles.

One of my favorite things about Mr. Figgles was the music. To this day I love the simple feel to the main menu song and the "go-get-em" feel to the level music. I do wish I made more tracks so it wasn't so monotonous, however, I still totally love hearing the music start up and never let go.

The Slot machine meta game was such a great addition that festered out of my want for a meta game. More people enjoy the slot machine more than the game! Which I can totally understand, I was the same way for a while :)

Purchasing powerups, this was a good AND a bad thing. I will go into the bad later but the good part is you can "plan" your next level based on your success throughout the game thus far. I found that idea exciting and really think Mr. Figgles benefited from having this, although, it has it's negative implications as well.

Last but certainly not least, the enemies. At first look you wonder why they are so lame... Then the beauty of necessity sinks into any flash developer who used MX 2004 and the burden of animation on the CPU. A self contained MC on a path can be set up on the level to achieve a smaller animation bound as well as WAY less CPU time for path-to-player calculations. The enemies have a "jump rope" kind of effect... wait for it, WAIT FOR IT, GO! I was very pleased with that.

Bad

What went wrong? HAHAHHAHAHHAHA EVERYTHING! Just kidding. The save game took way to long. 4 months to be exact. It really exposed my lack of understanding of variables, scope, and cookie writing stuff in Flash. The art was an after thought. Which is something new for me being a professional artist. While the style of the game I find very appealing to myself, there really isn't much there.

Enemies, while they were nifty, they weren't very compelling, or fear inspiring for that matter. The Charge imps were a great work around for limitations of the Flash platform, however, not ideal for this type of "collection" game.

While the powerup store was a very innovative idea, without lots of powerups and upgrades it fell a bit short. I really enjoyed using the powerups in combinations to suit my style of playing, but the reality is, there wasn't nearly enough depth to it.

Flash wrapper technology. At the time, flash jester was the best bet for releasing a game to the mass market when it was created in flash. Unfortunately I couldn't wrap it in the ActiveMark purchasing wrapper using this. A friend of mine had to make me a special wrapper that proved a bit problematic to say the least. A week of burning the midnight oil finally led to success, but it still wasn't fully customizable, like MDM's ZINC wrapper is today.

Conclusion

While Mr. Figgles may not have been the most amazing game I ever dreamt up, it is the most amazing game I ever finished. Simply the fact that it came out of zero understanding and it actually functions the way I saw fit to create it makes it the best game I have made to date. Without it, I wouldn't be able to create what I create today. Long live Mr. Figgles!