Download Traffic Jam

After a few weeks of the blog being live, I am very excited to bring you our first in-house Adobe® Air™ game. It’s basically an old game with a slick new look. It gets very challenging, and at some point you might even ask yourself if a particular level is even possible. But I assure you, they all are! You will start thinking outside of the box after a few of the more challenging levels. Levels of addiction may vary from user to user. I for one, am an addict already! See how fast you can beat the game!

Objective
Re-arrange all the vehicles on the screen so that you can free the red car from the traffic jam.

Features
The game saves itself and pauses the time when you exit, so you don’t have to worry about losing your place if you have to shut your computer down. If you want to start over just click the New Game. If you want just restart a level from scratch, click Restart Level.

Options
New Game, Restart Level, Fullscreen mode, and Mute sound.I am going to refrain from rating the game for now.

If it gets on the Adobe® Air™ Marketplace I will pull the rating from there at some point. Try the game out, let me know what you think! My good friend Dustin did all the programming and I did the graphics & music. If you have any questions about the procedure feel free to post or e-mail me at phil@theairgames.com

Update

Check out the Review from Jan V. on Adobe’s Marketplace! Thanks for the 5 star rating!

Great game, easy to lose track of time with! Very easy to learn and user friendly; it’s a great way to improve your problem solving skills! The only addition I would like to see is a public scoreboard with the fastest completion times. Again, great game, keep up the good work! -Jan V.

The latest Adobe Air game that I stumbled upon is called TurnAbout. If you have jailbroken your iPhone and installed the app installer you might recognize the game as Lights Out. It was also a mid 90’s electronic puzzle game. I have enjoyed playing this game through the years, as it is a good challenge and a super simple concept for a game.

Download TurnAbout

The general concept of the game is; turn off all the lights. Each level starts with several designated boxes in the on state. Click a box and it makes the four surrounding boxes (top, bottom, left, right) go to the opposite on/off state, as well as the box you clicked. As different combinations of the boxes are on and off, the game gets more and more challenging.

Overall the execution of the game is very good. The design is elegant, and not something you will have a hard time looking at for an extended period of time. It is also very functional. I’m loving the logo, which carries the theme of the game very well. One thing that I haven’t seen in any other Air games is Save functionality. Very cool! Cheers to a great construction!

One issue I saw so far was that the icon on Mac OS X Leopard isn’t working correctly, and I am getting the generic Mac Application icon. I’m sure this will be an easy fix and updated in short order. I also noticed that using the Command + Q command wasn’t working to quit the game. The quit option in the menu wasn’t working either. The only way I could close the game was by clicking the “x” icon in the actual application window.

One thing I would like to see is full screen capability. Sure it’s not really a game that requires full screen, but sometimes I just like to immerse myself in a game and forget about everything else on my desktop!

Bottom line is, this is a great game, at an even greater cost, FREE! Have you tried TurnAbout out yet? What do you think about it?

3 out of 5 stars

After stumbling on the latest game release for Adobe® AIR™ 1.0, I excitedly installed it. “Lines Game - an Adobe® AIR™ application” is an interesting game developed by Dinu Bogdan. It was quite apparent after the install that it was built by a programmer at heart. If you can get past the terrible interface, and bad English, the game-play is actually pretty fun and challenging. The transparency of the graphics will kill you if you have anything other than a solid background on your desktop. I noticed after installing on my Mac that the icon for the game is missing leaving me with a default Application Icon. I’m not sure if this is the experience on the Windows side. This has been fixed in the latest version. In Bogdan’s defense the game was created in 3 days for the Air Derby back in September of 2007. On the other hand, there has been plenty of time since then to pretty it up a bit for the Version 1.0 release. Hopefully we will see some improvements in the near future. The game definitely has potential for a higher rating. Read on for some Tips and the A2G Quick Start!

Download Lines

*Scroll down Badu’s page and you will see the install link in the right column.

Tips
In the Settings you can change the size of the game board, initial amount of balls, and the number that equals a Line. These options are reminiscent of Minesweeper. It’s nice to be able to choose your difficulty level starting out.

Quick Start
The object of the game is to clear all the balls from the screen by lining up 5 of the same color ball. All you need to do is click on a ball once and then click where you’d like to move it to. As long as the ball and the area that you are trying to move it to are not trapped in, you can move the balls wherever you want (including 8 spaces across the field). Each time you move a ball, 3 more are placed on the playing field, so try to group your colors with as few clicks as possible!

Have you played Lines? What did you think?

What is a Tongit? I had no clue so I searched for the definition on Google. Unfortunately it just asked “Did you mean tonight?” No! I mean Tongit! The best I can find is that it’s the name of a Filipino rummy card game. It’s also the name of one of the first games to be released for Adobe Air 1.0. After a few games I started getting the hang of it and having fun. Overall it’s a great game with a pretty challenging AI. The graphics could be a little better, but it doesn’t detract too much. If you have ever played Gin Rummy this game will come pretty quickly for you. If you don’t feel like reading through the 2 pages of instructions included with the game read on for my quick start.

Download Tongits

The Setup

1. Your hand

2. Gameplay options

3. Organize your cards however you want in this area.

4. Play your sets and straights in this area

5. Info pallet

6. Discard Pile (You can also draw from here if you can play the card you draw right away)

7. Draw Pile

8. Opponents played sets and straights. (Note that you can play off of these sets and straights by dragging your cards to them.)

9. Opponents hand.

Points

3 of a kind

4 of a kind

Straights (3 or more successive cards of the same suit) i.e. 3,4,5 of Hearts

Gameplay in a nutshell

1. Draw a card from the Drawing pile or the discard pile. If you pick from the discard pile you must play the card right away or it won’t let you discard.

2. Play your sets and/or straights.

3. Discard a card.

The rest will come to you by watching the computer beat you a few times! Have you played? What did you think?