During my last month at Big Fish Games, I made a mini-game called Berry Blast in Action Script 3. It’s one of those “bubble shooter”-type games. The mini-game was added to Big Fish’s My Tribe game on Facebook as a collectible decoration that you can play every day to compete with friends for the best score in one minute (Bejewelled Blitz style).

If you want to play it, you’ll have to start playing My Tribe (which I also worked on as part of a team) and collect a few crates until you get the Berry Blast mini-game decoration. It’s a common item so shouldn’t take too long to find. Also there are 3 other great mini-games made by other team members: a match-3, a pachinko-style game, and a spot the difference game (one of many design ideas I came up with that a co-worker did a really great job of).

Berry Blast was good fun to make, and had lots of little complexities that I tried to get right to ensure that it played well, and I think I did a good job because it’s fun and rewarding to play. I actually left just before the game was finished. It was functionally complete when I left, with placeholder 8-bit sounds (made with SFXR) and a few pieces of final art. Then a co-worker plugged in the final graphics and sounds and hooked it up to the My Tribe mini-game framework that handles all the competitive scoring and Facebook sharing etc. I think he even fixed a couple of small bugs, ahem 😉

It may only be a mini-game, but I was proud of it because I coded it from scratch in AS3 and learned a lot about the language along the way, and even made a neat little AS3 game framework (Big Fish owns the code, so I can’t share it, sorry).

If you manage to find Berry Blast in a crate and play it, please let me know what you thought!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2011 at 4:46 am and is filed under Minigames. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.