I’d like to start by introducing myself – Mark Hughes – and kicking off my new site with one of a few small projects I’ve made whilst diverting my attention from my big projects. I own a bead shop in the seaside town of Sidmouth, Devon. Whilst I am not selling beads or managing the business I’m either web developing or – my real passion – programming games. It’s these three topics I’ll mainly be writing about here!

My ‘big project’ is a space-based massively-multiplayer game developed in Flash (or Actionscript 3 to be more precise) that I’ve worked on for quite some time. It’s backed by a C++ server that is probably more trouble than it’s worth – so occasionally I distract myself by programming something different. Highly unpolished; here is one of those examples!

Simply fly around using the cursor keys and use the following additional keys:

C – Build a “crystal miner” to gather resources
D – Build an attack ship to hurt the other players
A – Attract the crystal miners to your ship (to move them)
S – Attract the attack ships to your ship (to move them)
Shift + Up arrow – short-lived thrust

Weapons:
X – Normal laser
Z – Heat-seeking missile
V – The Mantis – a highly accurate and dangerous weapon to enemies – slow charging

The green ships will try and take over enemy ships (and can spread very quickly when they get started! They are formidable!). Also – watch the crystals in the game; they can quickly cover the entire screen if they’re not harvested! The game can get very slow when there’s lots of objects on the screen – maybe I’ll further optimise that later if anyone’s interested in playing larger games. Each support ship costs 100 credits!