Game of the Week, er, Month Club - Freeport

The One Game A Month challenge is going on now. The idea is to make a different game each month. However, I'm a procrastinator, so it quickly turns into me rushing the game in the last week, despite how much I was trying not to.

The game I made in January was Freeport.

A week into the month, I made a prototype:

It wasn't anywhere near what the actual game was going to be, but it let me work out some ideas early on. Unfortunately, it turned out that transferring code from C# to AS3 isn't that easy. AS3 is very similar to JavaScript, and C# is more like Java. It's not quite copy and paste, especially when I wanted to get rid of a few hack-ish things I had done.

Everything eventually made it across, except for one feature: advertising. Originally I had an "advertise" button, where between rounds players could advertise one of the items to increase demand (but for an ever-increasing cost). I dropped it since it would have to either make the interface more cluttered or take the player out of the game between rounds to give them the option. It also wouldn't be easy to use anymore now that you're not all-knowing in the market like you were in the prototype.

Getting it online ended up being the most annoying part. I love the services Mochi provides, but it took them most of a week to get it hosted, although the ads were approved overnight. Fortunately, the One Game a Month people are pretty cool about things (and realize the whole thing is for fun), so they let you upload a month's game a while after the fact.