IN 20XX PANDA WERE FLYING THROUGH A SKY TO FIGHT WATERMELON.

FOR GREAT POWER AND BATTLE FLY AND WALKING FOR JUSTICE.

A PANDA IS YOU.

Rachel Nash and I would like to announce the public debut of DARLING MY PANDA VIOLENCE WALK (ダーリング・まい・パンダ・暴力散歩), a music-responsive side-scrolling video game and the second installment of Project Popcorn.
Inspired by and lovingly poking fun at Japanese anime, video games, and bizarre mistranslations thereof, DMPVW allows you to enter a link to any YouTube video and use that music as the soundtrack for your game. Various aspects of the game respond directly to what’s going on at any given moment in the music you choose; enemies pop up and march across the screen to the beat, enter at a height corresponding to a particular pitch, and even the boss may be more or less aggressive depending on the song. When you get hit, the music briefly distorts.

Some songs are definitely more difficult than others.

Whether you win or lose, you can post your score to Facebook in the form of a custom-generated graphic (which can also be sent to friends to gloat over your superior performance).

We’ve got a lot of ideas for future improvements and features, including multiplayer, and more bosses and stages.

The music-processing guts of the game are built on the ALF audio processing library for ActionScript created by Drexel’s METlab. Without this key component, this project would not have been possible.

I’d like to express great admiration, affection, and apologies to Miki Higashino, Konami Kukeiha Club, and Konami, whose music and games inspired and helped shape this game from start to finish. In particular, Konami Kukeiha Club’s track ‘Burning Heat’, from the opening stage of the game ‘Gradius II: Gofer no Yabo’, may have been the true seminal inspiration for this entire game. The version included as a preset here is a remake from one of Konami’s Dance Dance Revolution games. The opening 8-bit music that plays as your song is loading is the boss music from the NES/Famicom version of Salamander, or Life Force as it is known in the States.

P.S. All of the Japanese text is legit and actually means something.

Tonight I learned that if you are trying to make a watermelon boss in a Flash game move in simple (and stable) harmonic motion without it flying out of control, it is important to update the acceleration, then the velocity, and then the position. If you do it in the opposite order the period of the wave will increase out of control and your watermelon will go flying up and down off the screen.

Poor watermelon.

TL;DR: Flash CS5’s debugger will throw up a lung and stack dump all over you if you omit a “break” statement at the end of a switch().

So I’ve just spent the past couple hours trying to figure out why my game would compile and run if I used Publish, but the debugger would vomit out a stack dump with breathtakingly unhelpful and irrelevant messages when I tried to run in debug mode.

I initially thought the .fla might have become corrupted (too many years working with Access databases…I know, I know…and if you don’t know, count yourself lucky). So I recreated the project, cutting and pasting the stuff in. But the same thing still happened.

Eventually, through tedious commenting and uncommenting I noticed I was missing a break statement at the end of the final case of a switch. I tried putting that in and then everything ran fine.

Seriously? No “missing break statement” or “switch statement incomplete” or even “hmm…looks like you forgot something on line X”. No, instead, Flash just hurls out pages of “cannot reconcile x_class with y_class”. Or, in one terrifying case, “cannot reconcile x_class with x_class”.

Adobe’s online docs are also unhelpful with the particular error code:

1068 _ and _ cannot be reconciled. See the note at the bottom of this table.*

And the asterisked note at the bottom of the table:

So…yeah. I guess if the same thing happens to someone else and they happen to chance upon this post and are spared the annoyance, it will have been worth it.

Cheers.

EDIT: I should also mention that although it will compile without complaint, this can actually crash the damn browser plugin and turn your flash windows into kinda sad-Mac faces on puzzle pieces. If you’re into that kind of thing.

EDIT: A different problem, but a similar effect. I don’t think it’s being too harsh to say it’s “unforgivable” or “shameful” when Adobe’s DEBUGGER keeps crashing.

It’s like a water-soluble umbrella.

According to the employee handbook, I should probably have written my first blog post on Monday, but hopefully I will be forgiven this oversight.

It’s a little surreal; I didn’t take any time off between my previous job and this one, so on Friday I was there and now I am suddenly here.

It’s nice to be in a lively, dynamic environment where people are happy to be doing what they’re doing.