Jelly Battle was, and still is, one of our most successful games and was definitely the most well-received amongst the gaming community and portal sites. It’s also the one I enjoy playing the most revisiting it over three years on.

Jelly Battle is the sequel to Jelly Jumper, which introduced the flubber-style character and keyboard environment, and took the game to the next level – multiplayer. The premise is that you battle it out on the board with 3 other Jelly dudes and the last Jelly standing triumphs!

Each turns involves all four players simultaneously jumping to a nearby square and then activating the Action they have landed on. The different kinds of Action can be broken down into categories: Offensive (Purple), Damaging (Red), Defensive/Magical (Light Blue), Health (Green) and Teleport (Yellow).

Nuke – 30 damage to all opponents

Air Strike – Potential 30 damage to any visible opponents

Laser – 30 damage vertically and horizontally

Blast – Damage to nearby opponents based on proximity 40, 30 and 20

Random Drop – Selects a random visible player to drop an object onto – Anvil (25 damage, common), Hundredweight (30 damage, less common), Piano (50 damage, rare)

Handbag – Allows to swing a handbag in a 1 sqaure radius dealing 30 damage for a set number of turns

Shield – Protects you from damage for a set number of turns

Invisibility - Renders you invisible for a set number of turns, protects from air strikes and random drop (Invisibility is removed upon damage)

Jelly Rage – Doubles damage dealt for a set number of turns

Triple Jump – Extends the radius of your move area for a set number of turns

Debonus – Removes all other players’ bonuses

Freeze – Freezes one of your opponents on their square for one turn. Damage removes the freeze effect. Occasionally you may receive the Freeze All bonus, which freezes everyone.

Health – Restores a random amount of health between 30 and 50

Super Health – Restores you to your maximum health

Mine – Deals a random amount of damage between 20 and 40

Teleport – Transports you to a square at least 5 squares away.

The balance and distribution of the Actions is vital to the gameplay. Each Action is always counterable by another and the many different combinations of the possibilities of the four players’ moves requires quick and strategic thinking to come out victorious.

Chat is also available throughout the game, enabling plenty of Jelly banter and there are several ranks you can work your way up through via the sophisticated scoring system which takes into account your position and the quality of your opponents.

Jelly Battle has also been featured on BBC News Click, has been reviewed on Jayisgames and achieved our highest score on Newgrounds.

Who knows, maybe there’ll be a Jelly Battle 2 someday…

as I hadn’t realised that even though I was working locally, AIR meant it was working on a different domain. Having added an underscore:

Happy days.

We made this game back in 2007 but coming back to it now it’s still good fun. You play a little jiggling dude bouncing across a keyboard (game was originally built for Logitech) and your job is need to collect all the green keys.

There are 50 levels to complete, each with a perfect rating to achieve by finishing the level in the minimum number of bounces. The levels were built by a few of us using an in-house editor – I’d recommend this for any level-based game, the variety you get from different people’s approaches is always surprising and welcome. If you can then go the whole hog and implement a user-friendly editor built into the game which allows users to upload levels for everyone else to play then you’re onto a winner.

This kind of functionality means you should rarely have to program on the timeline and helps separate the design and coding process a little bit further, saving you the worry of clumsy designers deleting your ActionScript and generally breaking all your shit.

Warning: it is undocumented so I guess there’s no guarantee it’ll stick around but let’s hope so!

A viral football game is always popular with dedicated portals like allfootballgames.co.uk and myfootballgames.co.uk and this multiplayer football game has been one of the successful games we’ve done with several million players over the last 3 years  and has maintained an average of 25,000 multiplayer games played every day.

SINGLE PLAYER: You get 50 seconds to score three freekicks past the wall and the goalie. Your score, which is calculated on how close your shot goes to the top corners, is then multiplied depending on how quickly you score your goals. There are 10 levels, each increasing in difficulty in relation to goalkeeper ability and number of players in the wall obstructing your shot. This format allows plenty of practice time for new players whilst having an incentive for repeat players to achieve high-scoring goals as quickly as possible – nailing the 6x multiplier is the benchmark!

MULTIPLAYER: In multiplayer mode you match yourself up against players from around the world in a penalty shootout-style system with each player having five shots. If both are still level after five it goes to sudden death. You can also impact the other player’s shot by positioning a Super Save area, which, if hit by the opponent’s shot, will give a much higher chance to your keeper of saving it.

To use it you simply capture a screengrab with the Print Screen key or drag an existing image into the app, then within the application you can drag and resize the highlighted area to the selection you want to output and click Save. Options include changing your thumbnail size, change the source image scale and export to JPG, GIF or PNG. You can install it below:

Tip #1: You can use the arrow keys to accurately position your selection

Tip #2: You can double-click on the highlighted thumbnail or Ctrl + C to copy the thumbnail back onto the clipboard for use elsewhere.

Sound is something I’ve never really bothered too much about, but now Flash has some powerful abilities in this regard, awesomely demonstrated by HobNox’s Audiotool. So, dipping the metaphorical toe in the water, here’s a boshed together visualiser started with some code from Grant Skinner. It doesn’t use much of the data you have access to but the central burst represents left and right channel peaks and the white burst measures the left and right bass levels. Tune from the brilliant Dub FX.

For me ActionScript is the best part of the Flash platform and since the advent of AS3 I have begun to imagine how Pinocchio once felt. I’m a real programmer! But just as Pinocchio had to presumably deal with puberty, girls and self-loathing, real programming brings its own complications in way of abstraction, inheritance and polymorphism. For proper programming you need a proper IDE. The Flash authoring IDE is handy when it comes to animations and graphical layouts but to handle the code you need something which understands your demands as an OOP coder. There are some great ActionScript editors such as FDT and Flex Builder but for value for money, FlashDevelop can’t be beaten.

Free and open source, FlashDevelop provides you with many features including code-hinting, function generation, cope snippets and folder-wide searches, options that you’ll soon wonder how you lived without. Even small touches such as the ability to colourise the Output panel turn out to be pretty handy. If you’re still programming in the Flash IDE, grab it now. It represents such a significant step up that you’ll curse the day you ever have the misfortune to delve into the world of F9 and manually type out an import statement or an function for an event listener. You’ll feel like you’re wearing go-faster stripes. Made of Teflon.

Beanstalk

As ActionScript has evolved alongside Flash, so has the complexity of the projects and the  teams involved. Many Flash developers (myself very much included) come from a background where projects were solo builds and concepts like synchronisation or reusable code seemed a hassle and a waste of time. This is where SVN and Beanstalk come in to make your life much easier.

SVN is  a type of version control. This means it keeps track of changes you make to your code, the main benefit of which is allowing you to ensure that you, and anyone else in your team, are working with the latest version and that all previous versions are backed up and accessible at any time. If you want to get your hands dirty and or you’re working by yourself, you can run this locally or on a network, but to keep things simple we use Beanstalk. They will host your repositories (the libraries of code), handle all the technical side of things and present the package to you in such a user-friendly environment, complete with web hooks and integration with other web apps including Basecamp and Lighthouse, that you’ll want to give them a hug. On top of that their Starter package is free and the upgrades very affordable for teams of any size. All you need then is a SVN client (we use TortoiseSVN) and you should feel yourself glowing proudly, full of happy thoughts about teamwork and efficiency.

MonsterDebugger

We’ve all been there. Witnessing unexpected results in a browser environment and crying just for the want of seeing a simple trace statement. MonsterDebugger helps with that and a bunch more.

The very nice Monster guys from Holland have provided an AIR app that hooks into your SWF file through LocalConnection which means that wherever it’s running, be that IDE, desktop on in a browser, it can provide you with reams of data about your file and the sections of code you’ve ballsed up. Whilst it doesn’t tell you how to fix it, it does allow you to fully inspect any classes you set, dynamically change properties on the fly and monitor framerate and memory usage over time. Pretty smart, and we’re definitely looking forward to version 3.