It's not a flash game, but it IS a commercial quality action game using 3D hardware.

Perhaps more importantly to you guys, though, the music was done by NG's very own Rig!

So how's the gameplay? It's just a simple shooty thing where you blow shit up, right? Download the free demo, give it a try. Let me know what you think.

If you've ever made a flash thing that got panned by me, this is your chance for revenge. :D

Have fun. The free demo is pretty long and it never expires.

I saw a review recently, and it annoyed me enough to burn a Frontpage:

"To the people who voted below an 8: Do you understand the programming it takes to make a game of this scale? Of course this game has glitches! EVERY GREAT GAME DOES! I mean look at Halo, Gears of War, COD series, those games are the best right now and they have alot of glitches in them! So lay off him for the small glitches in the game! This is a programming master piece!"

Really? So every game no matter how bad automatically deserves an 8/10? Just for being a game? *Really?* By that logic I suppose every game should get at least a 4.0. After all, they're hard to make. That means it's okay if the game isn't fun or isn't playable, it's still at least 80% perfect.

No. I'm sorry. I review stuff all the time. There are games which deserve an 8, and there are games which deserve a 6. Hell, I've MADE some games that deserve a 6. And guess what? They get 1's and they get 10's and they get all kinds of numbers in between.

Yes, the game was just as hard to program as a good game would have been. No, that doesn't mean I should get the same score as someone who made a good game.

(Speaking specifically of Witching Hour and Linear Assault, here. That other game doesn't count. It was a freak situation, and the voting criteria were unusual at the time when it got most of its hits.)

Everyone's taste is different, and everyone's gameplay experience is going to be different. If I make a game, and one guy can blast away at the same stupid enemy over and over again for 20 minutes and not get bored because he LIKES that sort of thing, and another guy takes one look at the game and goes "Oh god it's just the same thing over and over again" and quits, and the first guy gives it an 8/10 and the second guy gives it a 2/10, guess what? THAT'S FINE.

This is friggin' Newgrounds! We don't give out Gold Stars for participation here!

The only number that matters is the game's final score. And YES, I'm aware that everyone just gives out 5's and 0's just to increase the weight of their vote by a marginal amount, but that DOESN'T MATTER, because lots of people voting 0's and 5's leads to everything from blams to high 4's. (Nothing ever gets a pure 5.0, because guess what? NOTHING'S EVER PERFECT.)

As of right now, the highest-scoring submission EVER on newgrounds has a score of 4.39. If that were an average of review scores-- of impulsive people reviewing with either a 1 or a 10 instead of a 1 or a 5, it'd probably look like 8.78.

That's a little over 8 and a half. In other words, 8 is the HIGH end of the scale. Not the low end.

I don't know where you got the idea that everyone deserves 8/10. If everyone starts counting at 8, and your submission GETS an 8, then guess what? You really got a zero out of two. Congratulations. Enjoy your 8.

I think the content of a review is more important than the big shiny number next to it, anyway, but that's another rant for another day.

Wow, I do not know when to shut up. :P

It's hard to believe I've already written 300 of these overly-wordy reviews. Big thanx to everyone who's flagged my reviews as Helpful, and every flash artist who's taken the time to respond to one of them. I'd say you make it all worthwhile, but let's face it, I'm not doing this for the feedback. I'm doing it because I'm an opinionated blowhard. :D

Here's to 300 more reviews! :)

The latest version of my Flash normal-mapping experiment seems to be (just barely) fast enough for a realtime game. Check it out, let me know what you think, and post your FPS, either here or at the DA site.

Remember, you need to click the button to see it with and without the normal-mapping. I guarantee you will see two different numbers.

What FPS do YOU get?

Thanks! :D Hopefully by getting feedback from Newgrounds throughout the development cycle, I'll be able to avoid the mistakes I made with my last NG game.

Update: Okay, it looks like this just isn't going to work out. Big thanks to everyone who participated. Flash just isn't the right format for this kind of thing. It's great for generating the normal maps, though. Maybe I'll take another crack at this using Unity...

Whoops, forgot to check the little "Front Page Post" button.

Oh well, no biggie.

I'm experimenting with normal mapping in Flash. Click here to help me stress-test this bad boy.

Warning: when you turn on the 3D effect, it may get very slow!

I'm currently seeing around 5 FPS on my computer. Hopefully I can double that somehow. We'll see...

I slapped together a quick technology test using normal maps in AS3. You can check it out here. Gameplay is still a ways off, but hopefully a realtime graphics demo will be availible soon.

Yes, it uses a variation of the technique pioneered by UnitZeroOne, so don't worry. It's fast. In fact, it might be faster than his realtime demo, since his demo used AS2 and MovieClips, and mine uses AS3 and BitmapDatas.

I did end up using a lot of fullscreen Draw commands, though, so it may lag a little on slower machines. I guess we'll find out once I get an animated demo cobbled together.

Don't worry, though, I fully intend to make it possible to turn off all the normal-mapped goodness and just enjoy shooting monochromatic vector baddies on a simple textured background.

If you have any suggestions or ideas, please post them here. I intend to work closely with the Newgrounds community to develop this game and refine the gameplay.

Witching Hour sucked. Mostly it sucked because the gameplay was weaksauce. I was rushed to get it done in time for the competition deadline, and I only had a few people helping me playtest it, and they weren't very into video games, so they were easily impressed and din't expect much of a challenge.

We don't want a repeat of that. So help me out a little, and make your voice heard. :)

I wish NG Alphas was working.

It's done! I'd like to thank everyone who's given me feedback on this project, Especially Carol & Tom, SnowHart & "the Complex," the gang at DeviantArt, the very patient professionals over at Kuripa, and Inglor for (hopefully) being a good sport about the logo thing.

18 days, one Spanish Inquisition at Kuripa, hundreds of lines of code and three complete engine rewrites later, I'm finally at the point where I can just sit down and convert my ideas directly into AS 3.0. Not only that, but the game uses BitmapDatas exclusively, features a special effect I like to call "Magic Smoke," and it runs close to the goal of 25 FPS on almost any system. I'll be sure and include an option to disable Magic Smoke, just to make sure.

Other than MagicSmoke, the game uses simple BitmapDatas for everything and copyPixels() whenever possible. No lag accumulates due to Garbage Collection, collision detection is almost instantaneous, and I finally figured out how to kill those pesky #1010 warnings. (Here's a hint: if you're stepping through an array, and other parts of your program can modify that array, make sure the stuff you're grabbing from the array is not null before you try to do anything with it!)

I want my orange and black back! And no, I'm not talking about the Newgrounds redesign when I say this. I'm talking about Halloween.

Used to be, you'd see Halloween decorations in all the stores this time of year, but not anymore. Since 1957 they've been celebrating Christmas non-stop from September to Feburary, but now even that has been supplanted in favor of Paint The Town Pink Month.

It's friggin' everywhere. I wish I was being sarcastic. I mean, literally, there's big pink balloons and banners and ribbons everywhere in my area. Target. Wal-Mart. Grocery store. Any Halloween stuff is tucked away on a tiny shelf down some forlorn asile, as if it were out-of-season stock or something.

So, I'm thinking, if this goes on all month, what's gonna happen to Halloween? I'm guessing America's ever-ingenious consumers are going to see all the pink in the stores, go "You know? Let's have a Breast Cancer Awareness Party this year, Instead!" Kids will come by looking for candy, and instead they'll get pamphlets about checking their tits for tumors.

It's like they're replacing our last great irresponsible fun-fest holiday with some kinda crappy edutainment. What are they gonna do next? Make July "Fire Safety and Sensible Diet Month" so we can't have any fun on the 4th?

Even if the holiday survives, I'm thinking one night of the macabre just isn't going to be enough to wash the taste of an entire month of Pink out of my mouth.

I'm really not trying to be mysogynistic about this. Nobody loves breasts more than me, and I'd do anything to give them the support they deserve. I just don't see why we need to pave over a perfectly good existant holiday with an entire month of Pink crap on the walls.

I agree it's a good cause, but couldn't we move this Awareness thing to, I don't know... May? How about May. May has Mothers' Day in it, but paving over Mothers' Day wouldn't be as severe of a change. If anything, the two celebrations would probably compliment each other. Our Moms could enjoy looking at all the pretty pink decorations for a couple weeks, leading up to and following their big day. And guys would never forget Mothers' Day because there'd be pink reminders plastered all over literally everywhere we look. We'd see the pink, and think "Woah! It's that time of year! Mothers' Day must be coming!"

Right now when I look around, all I can think about is "Ugh. Pink!? It's supposed to be ORANGE." Every time I'm first exposed to the decorations, there's this "shit, my eyes aren't working right" moment. It's driving me crazy.

But more to the point, I already know ALL ABOUT breast cancer. And the REASON I know all about it despite not being a chick is, the hundreds of advertisements I've seen, heard, and read over the past several years during Breast Cancer Awareness Month. It's just they did it without destroying Halloween, back then.

But I figure if I, the last person in the world who needs to worry about breast cancer, am AWARE of it, then it stands to reason that all the women must have heard about it a LONG TIME ago. Women are very efficient at passing along information. You don't need to paint all the halloween decorations pink to get the word out. All you need to do is drop a few gurellia marketeers in Times Square and have 'em couch all known breast cancer news, information, and medical advice in the form of secret gossip about coworkers. Within 24 hours, every female in the known universe will be an expert.

Merry friggin' Boob Day.

Update: Feburary would be another good one. It'd be all pink, pink pink, Happy Venerial Disease, pink, pink, pink, March.