It’s a simple, no- nonsense racer with time limits to beat and minor upgrades to be had.  No grind necessary here – about 20 minutes will see you suitably kitted out with enough bolt-ons to unlock all the levels and whizz around in a glowing white-hot supercar.  Just how they used to be.  The smoothly-executed vector graphics give a credible illusion of speed, even more so when your turbo-glow effect is applied and you plunge headlong into the void with a breathtaking turn of speed.  It’s like the jerky 16-bit days of yore, but with ramped-up graphics balancing out an unfortunate lack of hummable tunes.

A twist on a bygone era but that deserves to keep you busy tomorrow lunchtime.

Neon Race on Kongregate

CMD is a the third hand-drawn explore-’em-up in a series from SilverStitch, continuing from Colour My Heart and Colour My World, and their theme of love bringing about colour into a drab, monochrome world.  The artwork has opened out from the earlier games, settling into a detailed, hand-drawn style slightly reminiscent of Mateusz Skutnik’s Daymare Town series. Playing at least Colour My World first is recommended, as there is a general lack of instruction which I found made gameplay initially unfathomable.  (This is despite having played CMW many moons ago, which did give the player a better idea of what was required.)

The emphasis seems to be on taking in the small world, although there are a couple of puzzles which drive the narrative forward.  I didn’t feel these were as well signposted as they could have been, but they represent a change from the earlier games’ more linear progression.  The story is less subtle this time around, though, and the puzzle payoffs consequently are satisfying enough.   Overall, the game is quite short and I wouldn’t expect you to require a second cup of tea – an ideal play for an autumn evening.

This isn’t actually my favourite in the Colour My… series – but more about that nearer Christmas.

Colour My Dreams on Armor Games.

The exploratory theme is addressed brilliantly with a twist on the Strider-style “room-reveal” platforming that I’ve never seen before, but I don’t really want to spoil the wonderful idea, so I’ll tempt instead  with a screenshot of 1/3 of the way through one of the later levels.  The graphics and music are an excellent and consistent fit, and despite some people complaining of control problems, I’ve had none.

Go play.

One to watch, though – it looks striking, and remains work-in-progress – the author says they’ll be “fixing up” some stuff soon.

Via the all-knowing TIGSource forums.

Now, I’ll be upfront and say that the story plods a little, the platforming isn’t overly original – your usual rolling rocks, switches and buttons are all in residence.  The tutorial seems overlong for a seasoned platformist like me and the puzzles aren’t at all complex.

But.  It is gorgeous.

If someone took a faint memory of Samorost as a starting point, and polished it up to a gleaming shine.  These are without doubt some of the best graphics I’ve seen in a Flash game to date.  It’s a beautiful world full of one-off touches, such as little characters going out about their daily business, and one-shot graphic effects that betrays this game as an obvious labour of love.  Fantastic stuff.

The first 26 levels are free, and another 50-odd are available for a reasonable price.  Recommended, especially to those who are a lot newer to the genre than I.

TextFormat.getTextExtent()

would give me a reliable figure.

It seems like a reasonable method of solving the problem: Measure the text, then do whatever you need with the result (fit your text to a box, for example.) Unfortunately, it doesn’t really pan out. The values returned in the Object you get back differ between Flash Player version, platform and browser. Great! Apparently some Mac player versions return the value in twips, and not pixels, too.

The strangest variation I found was that the same platform, browser and player gave different values depending on whether the font was installed or not, even though the font was embedded. I’m guessing it’s possible that Flash could be using the metrics in the installed font if available, which are correct, whereas the embedded ones are somehow wrong. A theory that I have no hope of proving, but a theory nonetheless. (I’ve had similar problems with sIFR before.)

The result wasn’t quite as bad as just using

Math.random()

instead, but it’s getting that way.

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// Returns values incorrect by ~10% varying
// between platform and browser
aTextField.getTextFormat().getTextExtent.width;

At this point I was considering refactoring the project to use AS3, which has a

getTextLineMetrics()

method which I hoped would fix everything. But that would require a fair amount of hassle, so I tried autosizing the TextField and measuring that. It didn’t want to know, and soundly ignored any kind of sizing I tried to set. Cheers. However, I finally discovered non-obvious textWidth and textHeight properties of the textField, which seem to give the right values. So the steps are to measure some text are:

1. Create an invisible text field (or use an existing one) with the appropriate textFormat
2. Set the text in the field to the phrase to measure
3. Use textWidth and textHeight to get the dimensions you need

And finally, some (untested) AS2 code:

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// Assumes textField with instance name 'field' on the stage
 
var field:TextField;
var textFormat:TextFormat;
textFormat = new TextFormat("Verdana", 16, 0xffffff);
 
field.setTextFormat(textFormat);
 
field.setText("I am the ruler of measuring text");
 
trace("Width of text is: " + field.textWidth + ", and height is: "  
+ field.textHeight);

You get the idea. Until next time…