Being a new year (as well as a being a while since my last post) I thought I would let you know what I have been working on and what content you can expect to see on this blog in 2012.

For the past six months I have been working on a 2D game engine that I have developed from scratch. The goal of this engine is to allow absolute freedom and ease in creating game content. So far I am pleased with the results of it, even if it is quite rough around the edges.

Without going into too much detail of the engine, it is based on a Component Based Entity System architecture. I have found using such a system allows for more freedom at the game logic layer and makes game changes easier to implement. Expect to see a few posts coming up explaining the architecture, the benefits and how I used it in my game engine.

Of course with all this game engine programming I have been using  Box2D  to power the physics and so have been experimenting with it. One of my aims was to to create a rope in the Box2D world, for which Box2D is notoriously difficult to get right. My latest creation is a climbable rope to go alongside my shooting out rope. Again, expect to see a few posts on this as well as other bits and pieces to do with Box2D.

In other news, you may be aware Adobe has pulled out of supporting Android devices with Flash Player. I feel that this unfortunately signals the decline/end of the Flash player. Rather than being too dismayed about this, instead, I see this as an opportunity for me to branch out and increase my skill set.

The first technology in my cross hairs to learn is Android development. With the marketshare of the Android platform increasing, the open nature of the development environment, as well as the similarity of Java to ActionScript 3.0 it looks like an exciting platform to target. This means that you can expect to find more Android related tutorials popping up here, including a Flash to Android tutorial series!

So 2012 is shaping up as a big, challenging, and exciting year!

Hope you enjoy.