Story of a Sheep Dog
It was mid-January 2007 when I decided it was time to give the Lassie editor a face lift. The Director system was clunky and archaic, and not terribly well matched to creating layouts intended for Flash. So, the concept was simple: rebuild the exact same editor tool in Flash; and so Lassie Shepherd was born. And yes, it fizzled over the following months. While the Flash editor concept was good, there was a lot working against it... The biggest of which was the fact that the Lassie game player had many fundamental flaws that a new editor would not resolve. A new version of the same editor would just perpetuate the same application problems. Also, a new version of Action Script was on the horizon, making AS2 projects soon-to-be obsolete. However, direction was restored in September of '07 when Matthias Kempke and I went hiking in the Swiss Alps. We hammered out a pretty solid direction for the Lassie engine to head in, which addressed major requirements of the game player its self. At Christmas '07, I started on Lassie SuperSheep, the new Lassie game player application. The system is looking pretty good, although development tapered off as it became more and more crucial to get a data provider worked out before proceeding on the game playback engine (...because you can't run a game without data!). And so it was that in mid-January 2008 --almost exactly one year after conception-- Shepherd went back into production, from scratch, written in ActionScript3. Now two months later, I've rebuilt a massive portion of the original editor... and we now have a prize for con-*test*-('") winners: http://lassie.gmacwill.com/shepherd A login.
It was mid-January 2007 when I decided it was time to give the Lassie editor a face lift. The Director system was clunky and archaic, and not terribly well matched to creating layouts intended for Flash. So, the concept was simple: rebuild the exact same editor tool in Flash; and so Lassie Shepherd was born. And yes, it fizzled over the following months. While the Flash editor concept was good, there was a lot working against it... The biggest of which was the fact that the Lassie game player had many fundamental flaws that a new editor would not resolve. A new version of the same editor would just perpetuate the same application problems. Also, a new version of Action Script was on the horizon, making AS2 projects soon-to-be obsolete. However, direction was restored in September of '07 when Matthias Kempke and I went hiking in the Swiss Alps. We hammered out a pretty solid direction for the Lassie engine to head in, which addressed major requirements of the game player its self. At Christmas '07, I started on Lassie SuperSheep, the new Lassie game player application. The system is looking pretty good, although development tapered off as it became more and more crucial to get a data provider worked out before proceeding on the game playback engine (...because you can't run a game without data!). And so it was that in mid-January 2008 --almost exactly one year after conception-- Shepherd went back into production, from scratch, written in ActionScript3. Now two months later, I've rebuilt a massive portion of the original editor... and we now have a prize for con-*test*-('") winners: http://lassie.gmacwill.com/shepherd A login.