Play the game here

Use WASD keys or Arrow Keys to move and use the mouse to shoot the bad guys.

This game is a port of my entry for the 48 hour game jam. Originally it was written with the XNA framework in C# but I decided it would be a prime candidate to test the flash waters. Although this time around I added ‘Easy’ and ‘Normal’ difficulties.

I’ve got a couple more flash game ideas floating around in my notebook (aka scraps of paper strewn about my bedroom.) So hopefully we’ll see another release before too long.

Let me know what you think. Good and bad – I’ll write a future post on my first experiences with flash and Robofortress itself at a later date.

Java applets have almost completely disappeared where as Flash has become so synonymous with in-browser games that a few people who have tagged my games on StumbleUpon as a ‘Cool Flash Game’

At first I chose java because – Well, I already knew it and I wasn’t that concerned with making money by putting my games on the various Flash aggregate portals, I just wanted to draw some traffic to my own site with some fun free games.

The unfortunate thing is that it is very, very hard to draw traffic to your site, just by having a couple of free games to play.

And for a while I didn’t actually mind that I didn’t make much money through google adsense, because I made some pretty cool games that I was proud of and I thought where quite fun.

But now I’m thinking about a couple of small game ideas that I wouldn’t mind persuing and I think the best platform for delivering small freeware games is in the browser on the web. Leave the downloadable delivery mechanism for more ambitious titles.

So here I am wondering if I should learn Flash?

A couple of years ago I didn’t like Flash one bit – But that was when I had a p4 with 256mb of ram and a geforce2. On a modern PC it actually has good performance and over the last year or two there have been a number of flash games that have actually impressed me.

Also I have heard that Actionscript 3.0 is a much improved programming language with all the OO features you can shake a stick at. And many of the Flash tools are now more focused at developers, rather than only at our right-brained brethren.

So, maybe I should learn Flash? Stay tuned for updates.