I posted earlier about the poor poster from “Crazy on the Outside” before. But I recently saw this poster for “Neighbours” with John Belushi and decided to contrast the two.
See how much more expressive people were on posters before Photoshop?
I do kind of love this photo of Alfredo Stroessner. So damn ostentatious.
I think if left entirely to my own devices, I’d dress like Tank Girl.
Other potential influences: Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, 2NE1 and these “Lego inspired” clothes.
I don’t have many good male role-models for this.
I appeared in and edited a short movie for the 90 Second Quickie. It’s called “Too Many Zombies.”
I also made a slightly altered version.
For effects, I ended up using the most motion-tracking of any video I’ve done before.
I made a game for local prog rock band Mahogany Frog. The game is called Mahogany Frogger.
It’s the second thing I’ve made using FlashPunk the first being my entry for the Room Jam.
You can play Mahogany Frogger here.
I was intrigued by a side-comment in this article about glasses that evaluate facial expressions:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-27083_3-20077393-247/social-x-ray-specs-help-us-read-emotions/
The company is also in talks with a Japanese firm that wants to use the software to distinguish between 10 different types of smiles on Japanese faces, including bakushu (happy smile), shisho (inappropriate giggle), and terawari (acutely embarrassed smile).
I really want to hear the full list of smiles.
So one of the things that’s weird with Flash games is the ability for it to create these hyper-specific sub-sub-genres. Some of the broader genres I’ve come across are the “room escape” games and the “tower defense” games. Tower defense has done well enough for itself to spread to non-Flash platforms, but I think it originated just as a stripped-down version of an RTS. And the room escape games are like a short version of the graphic adventure games popularized by Myst.
Then, when you start looking for even narrower genres, you get stuff like the Box 2D Physics-based Puzzle Games, which produced the Angry Birds. Or the Kitten Launching genre, where you launching something and hope for the best. (The genre seems to be expanding towards games where you can buy upgrades for your Penguin Launching Cannon, or even steer your rocket ship/submarine.) {Upgrades are how to make someone feel like they’re improving at a game if it doesn’t depend upon skill at all.}
I’ve just encountered a Flash genre that is new to me. It’s “kissing games.” You score points by kissing someone, but it’s vitally important you do it only while nobody is watching.
This one’s the only one I’ve seen that’s actually sort of fun:
http://www.ampgames.com/game/161/Office-Love-Kiss.html
You are co-workers trying to kiss at work without the boss seeing you. This has the best graphics of any I’ve seen, plus I think it helps that the boss will talk on the phone and has these little fake-outs like he’s about to put down the phone but he’s really just switching to the other hand. Also, this is the only one I’ve seen that comes close to motivating their need for secrecy. You’re keeping it secret from your boss that his employees are at it, plus I suspect the boss has a crush on the girl and that makes him more angry about employee fraternizing than he otherwise would be. There are others where it’s game over if a random waiter or stewardess wanders up and sees you kissing, which I see as ridiculously prudish and/or a sign that these games are never going to catch on in Western countries.
Once I started actively searching for these things, I found some awkwardly bad ones, like this:
http://www.gameslist.com/playonline/Lovers-Kiss-Game
This one is at least stupid enough to be amusing. A lot of them strip it down to bare essentials like “kiss on the bus when the other passenger is not watching,” or something, and becomes boring. This one introduces weird elements like you are wandering a beach with a dozen different guys, and four or five of them look like the guy you want to kiss. But you can’t kiss him while anyone else is watching. That any random stranger seeing you kiss someone at the beach is a blow to your well-being is so prudish. But that there are a handful of guys on this beach that I can treat as completely interchangeable is very licentious. Plus, if you stop kissing any particular guy, he simply disappears and you must go find another guy that looks like him. Maybe you’re some kind of alien succubus, devouring their beings and moving on to the next. (I shouldn’t put too much of a gender reading into this, I got to pick my sex at the beginning of the game.)
Swfmill is a program that will convert Flash .swf files into .xml and back again. I found a bunch of those cheesy Flash banner games here. I ran some of them through SwfMill and messed around with the XML files, and they turned out a little like this: