Careless Talk
Costs Lives
A game of WWII Stealth, Subterfuge and Turkeys

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Download Source .ZIP

This wacky little game was made using Actionscript 3.0 and Flixel, a powerful retro Flash library. The premise of the game came from the “Careless Talk Costs Lives” WWII propaganda posters. These posters of course referred to spies gleaning information from the populace, but many feature Hitler himself in various disguises or hiding in plain sight. I saw a lot of charm in drawing a silly toothbrush mustache and angry eyebrows on commonplace objects, and listening in on civilians having droll conversations, occasionally gossiping about military troop movements. I also enjoy the idea that “winning” the game isn’t necessarily a good thing. Careless Talk started off as a project I wanted to have open and shut in a week, but as it neared the deadline, I decided to beef it up into a full fledged portfolio piece. It ended up taking about one week for gameplay, 2 weeks for art, and one week for polish.

Asteroid Wrangler
Collaboration with Pat Kemp

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Asteroid Wrangler Source .ZIP 

 This Flixel powered toy was built while on a road trip with my friend Pat Kemp during a 3 day road trip. I did most of the coding, and Pat did most of the design, taking turns alternating driving and working on the laptop to keep ourselves entertained. You are in command of a space station (grey square) deep in an asteroid field, and it is under attack from all sides! Holding the left mouse button will activate your tractor field. Asteroids caught in the field will automatically be pulled into orbit around your space station. Pressing X will fire a single missile at your station. Your asteroid ring will protect you from explosions, but you can also destroy the missiles directly before they reach you by clicking and dragging from your space station, and releasing on the yellow indicator arrow. Doing so will consume one asteroid from your ring. Pressing C will launch a stream of missiles, which is very hard to defend against.

Triangle Applet
Apex Learning Lesson

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Download Source .FLA

This Actionscript 2.0 triangle visualization was done for Apex Learning. The storyboard for this particular lesson referenced a java app in which you could drag around the vertices of a triangle while showing and hiding various mathematical points, lines and their various intersections. A static, or even tween-animated triangle with highlighted lines was not nearly as informative as being able to manipulate each vertex yourself, so I built this. The most difficult part was figuring out the math behind the various triangle parts, and reverse engineering the formulas to be able to draw them for any triangle.

Approximation of a Circle
Apex Learning Lesson

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Download Source .FLA

This Actionscript 2.0 circle approximation visual aid was also done for Apex Learning. Similarly to the Triangle Applet, a series of n-gons with more and more sides was not nearly as interesting as being able to play with the number of sides yourself. After building the app, it was clear that there needed to be some color difference between line segments to truly convey the idea of hundreds of tiny lines making up a circle, so I added a checkbox to alternate the color of the segments. This raised the problem of having duplicate colored segments at the start and finish of the circle, so I made the first segment gray, serving as both a helpful visual anchor for the start of the circle, and a solution to my previous problem.