Congratulations to the winners! My game, Bacteria Bash, only got an honorable mention but seeing as this was my first flash game I'm mostly happy with that. It's disappointing to miss out on some of that cash though :-)

In retrospect, I should have made my game much simpler than it was, I aimed beyond the limitations of my abilities. Maybe if I'd done something that relied less on good characterisation and believable physics, I might've had a chance. Oh well.

At 8/10/07 11:44 PM, BoMToons wrote: BTW, Tom got around to making a collection page!

http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/wig giworld.html

Bacteria Bash isn't on that list, I'm pretty sure there are a few others missing too... I assume that list isn't the one you're using for judging, but still thought I'd point it out.

Bacteria Bash is 100% drawn by me, too; my final submission will be in tonight, once I fix up a few small bugs. Looking forward to seeing everybody's finished submissions!

At 8/6/07 03:49 PM, BoMToons wrote: just a reminder that the last day to submit your Wiggi World games is August 10th which is this friday! Good luck!

Thanks, BoMToons! I will be submitting an updated version of Bacteria Bash in the next couple of days with some added powerups and better HUD, hopefully it will round out the game a bit more and improve my chances in the contest!

Are we allowed to resubmit our game if we want to make some improvements and / or fix some bugs? How do we go about that, just update the game in our Newsgrounds entry, and email the new copy?

Game is submitted!

BoMToons, please let me know if you don't get the email with my .fla in it, the attachment is large-ish so hopefully it doesn't get blocked anywhere along the way.

By the way, you have an error in your instructions on the contest site, you say we need to reference _root.WPI_StopSingleGame(score) when our game is complete, but in the preloader you provided it is actually _root.WPI_ArcadeStopSingleGame(score). I've used the latter so I hope that is correct.

Noted. I was probably aiming a bit past my actual graphical skills with that concept, so I'll rethink it and probably just bring it in line with the main menu. Look for my final entry in the next couple of days :)

Since I'm nearing completion on my entry I thought I'd post it up here to get some final feedback before I finish and submit it in the next couple of days.

Here is the latest version.

I still have to finish finding some sounds and putting some music in, but other than that I think it's pretty much done. I will probably tweak the levels a little also. Oh, and the 'Menu' buttons when you die or complete the game don't work yet.

Please let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions or comments!

Oh awesome, thanks for the great feedback! A lot of the things you mentioned were already on my to-do list but it's good to have that second opinion to show I'm going in the right direction.

You've given me some good ideas for some different characters as well, I hadn't thought of that; I might put in a couple of good characters that drop powerups or give you a shield or something.

I will be working on making it more obvious when you're damaged, the cracks that are in there now are actually leftovers from a previous incarnation of the ship. Dents are a good idea too.

It is difficult to show whether the bacteria or the ship will be damaged... I'll try implementing your suggestions, I also thought maybe I'll change the expression on the face of Dr Wiggi, make him look scared if they're coming from above or something. I may change the way collisions are detected too.

Different levels are a good idea, I wasn't sure whether I was going to continue to develop this game or just submit it and try something new, but since it seems like it will have a good chance I'll work to expand it a bit, perhaps have a map of the patient's body that the Dr is working his way through so there's some progression in there, with different backgrounds and characters each step of the way.

Thanks heaps for your feedback!

OK, since there's so much good feedback happening in this thread I thought I'd post my current, nearly complete entry. You can see it HERE. This is my first flash game so please be gentle :)

Arrow keys to move, the help is not fully complete yet so the aim of the game is just to get the highest score, if you knock out 5 germs in a row without landing you'll get a health powerup.

Still to be done: better start menu and game over screen, extend the help, sound effects, a few more graphical effects.

At the moment I'm thinking the gameplay is pretty much done, but do you think it will be too difficult for children? It's probably aimed at kids around 8-12 I would imagine, I'm not sure how that fits in with your demographic.

Anyway, can't wait to hear your thoughts!

Is it a problem if a game requires two players? I have a game idea that I might try but it would be a lot more difficult if I had to implement a computer controlled second character in the case that only one person is playing.

I'm only just starting in Flash development so I don't really know the performance limitations, but I would think sort of thing would definitely be possible as long as you didn't get too ambitious. I mean, Artificial Life games have been around for a long time, just look at Conway's Game Of Life for one of the earliest examples.

This is something I'll probably try to do once I've learnt Flash a bit better, I've tried before in things like Java and XNA but the graphical programming usually got the better of me; luckily Flash handles a lot of that stuff for me so I can focus on the actual game itself.

ActionScript 3 would probably help a lot with this too, as defining things properly into classes and using Interfaces always helps with these sort of things.

I'm not sure how you would go about implementing actual gameplay into these sort of things though; influencing evolution is one way as some people have said, influencing the environment is another. Personally I don't think it's absolutely necessary, though the ideas I have will probably let the player set the initial variables, and then just play out the simulation based on that, so the fun and challenge comes from trying to predict how an organism with certain variables will survive in the world.

I would love to see more of these types of games created, and hopefully soon I can take part in making some.

Another questions for BoMToons:

Are there limitations on how we can setup the scoring? You mentioned that the amount of Wogs gained from our game will be scaled based on the top possible score, but what about games where the aim is to get the highest score possible, ie. no upper limit? Are these scoring structures prohibited, or will you just pick a reasonable exchange rate between game scores and Wogs?

Also, thanks heaps for the music and sprites, they are going to help a lot in replacing my current placeholders :)

Thanks for that, it turns out it was something completely different that was messing me up anyway: I was mixed up on how for...in loops worked and was trying to hit test against a string, hah.

Thanks heaps for your help though :)

At 6/28/07 12:17 AM, noob-toast wrote: You can reference it's parents co-ordinates subtract it's own;

blah.hitTest(_parent._x-_x, _parent._y,-_y,false)

Isn't that a point hit test? All you're doing is testing the registration point of the sub-clip against blah, whereas I want to test the entire bounding box of the sub-clip against blah.

So, using my hierarchy I want to be able to do this from within the Ship MovieClip:

if (this.TestBox.hitTest(_parent.Level.LevelPiec e)) { //do stuff }

But if I do that currently it doesn't work because they TestBox and LevelPiece are on different co-ordinate systems.

I'd rather not have to do a bunch of point hit tests if I can help it, that's my fallback position if I can't get this to work though. I was hoping there would be an easier way to apply global co-ordinates to a bounding box like there is to a point, but if that's not the case I guess I'll have to do it the hard way.

OK, seems like I can't edit posts, that hierarchy didn't quite come out like it should have, here's a clearer version:

_root
-- Ship
---- TestBox
-- Level
---- Level Piece
---- Level Piece

Hey all, I'm sure you're sick of basic questions like this one but I've searched pretty extensively and can't seem to find an answer to my question.

To give you an overview, here is my stage hierarchy (these are all MovieClip objects:

_root
- Ship
- TestBox
- Level
- Level Piece
- Level Piece

I am trying to do a simple bounding box hit test between TestBox and each of the Level Piece clips, but even when they are clearly overlapping the condition is returning false. Im pretty sure this has to do with the fact that the co-ordinates of TestBox are based on Ship and the co-ordinates of Level Piece are based on Level and are thus not in the same co-ordinate space, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to get them right.

(I know I could probably take the bounds of each object and use localToGlobal to convert the points, but then what? Do I create new objects from those points and hit test those? And it seems like there must be an easier way than this anyway)

So, sorry if this is a stupid question, but any help would be greatly appreciated and would let me continue work on my game!

Are there any common enemies to the Wiggis in WiggiWorld? As in, are there any characters that the Wiggis are in conflict with? Or should I just make any 'enemies' generic style 'bad things' - maybe wild animals, robots?

Alternatively I suppose I could make them other Wiggis, and make the whole thing into a game they are playing against each other, which may make it more child suitable.