archives | wasted potential

Game Time: This Is The Only Level

On January 20, 2013

As promised, I’m going to start featuring some games that I think you should be playing. This Is The Only Level is a free Flash game, but don’t let it’s appearance fool you – this is a great action/puzzle game.

It looks ridiculously simple, but it’s actually an interesting conceptual game where the goal and layout of each stage never changes – you need to pilot your character (the elephant) to the exit on the lower right side of the gameboard. The hook is that the rules and mechanics of gameplay change on each stage and it’s up to you to figure out how to get to the exit each time. Each stage has a name which is a clue to how the mechanics work, but the names often don’t make sense until AFTER you have completed a stage.

You can see from the screenshot that you don’t need to invest a lot of time in the game to enjoy it (my time isn’t even particularly speedy). It’s a unique casual game and there are a few sequels if you find that One Level isn’t enough.

Why I Still Make Games in Flash/AS3 (for now)

By Andy

On January 14, 2013

In Actionscript/AS3, Flash, Game Development, HTML/CSS, javascript, Uncategorized

As I look ahead to this year, I have several posts planned around game development in ActionScript 3 (Flash). So, I thought I should post a brief explanation about why I’m STILL developing games in AS3. After all, isn’t Flash dead? Aren’t we all living in a brave, new HTML5 world? Here are a few of the reasons why I’m developing in AS3:

actionscript vs javascript As of this post, HTML5 <canvas> support is still inconsistent across major browsers. Admittedly, the main issue is Internet Explorer, but they still have a HUGE market share and can’t be completely ignored. For most of our <canvas> projects at work, we still end up building a Flash backup. If you’re targeting desktop devices for your games, publishing to Flash gives you a bigger market share than HTML5 <canvas>.

HTML5 <audio> support is pitiful. In some browsers (*cough* Mobile Safari *cough*), it barely works at all. Then there are issues with preloading sounds so they are actually available when you need them.

A New Direction for Wasted Potential

By Andy

On January 5, 2013

In Game Development

For the past several years, this blog has been used as to provide helpful info to Web and Flash Developers. Basically, I would post solutions to problems that I couldn’t easily find elsewhere on the interwebs. It was just a place for developers to find resources to help with their day jobs.

There are several problems with this approach. First, the blog is a bit unfocused because it tends to reflect whatever I’m doing at my job. So, I have tips for WordPress, Flash, HTML, PHP, javascript, etc… I work with a lot of different technologies and I tend to post about whatever I’m working with at the moment. Another issue is that this type of blog works best with long, tutorial style posts. I’m a pretty busy guy these days and I just don’t usually have the several hours it takes to create a long tutorial. So, a lot of really great posts never get finished. I have unfinished drafts of tutorials for Drupal, CreateJS, and a wide variety of other things because I just don’t have the time to finish them. I also only post something about 6 times a year because of the time required to generate something worthwhile.

Well, it’s a new year and I’m going to take things in a new direction. Instead of being just about web development, Wasted Potential will be about indie game development, old-school gaming, electronics hackery, and related stuff (or even unrelated stuff that I find interesting). I’ll still post solutions to developer problems, but it will no longer be the main focus. It’s going to be a bit more personal and hopefully more interesting for me and everyone else.

I’m going to start by posting more often about what I’m doing in my spare time, as well as cool things I see other people doing. I also hope to roll out a new design for the site in the next few months. Stay tuned.

SOLVED: WordPress pages 404 Error on new server

By Andy

On November 27, 2012

In PHP/mySQL, Uncategorized, Wordpress

I ran into this problem recently when moving a client’s WordPress site to a new server. On the old server, all of the pages had permalinks set up and they worked great. After moving the site, none of the pages were working, except the home page. All of the other pages gave me a 404 error. The admin pages worked fine.

When diagnosing this issue, you need to check a few things. First, check that your admin panel is still working when you log in. If not, you may have a problem with your base urls in the database. To check this, log into your phpmyadmin panel and check the wp_options table in the database. There are 2 entries that contain the site url. Make sure that they are correct.

Assuming that your admin panel is working, the issue is probably a server setting causing a problem with the Permalinks. To check this, go to the Settings>Permalinks page and change the setting to Default. Now, go back to your homepage and see if your pages are working. The permalinks will NOT work, but you should be able to click around using the navigation.

If your pages now work, then the problem is that mod_rewrite is not enabled correctly on the new server. If you want to check this, simply create a new htaccess file with the following code:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wp/
RewriteRule ^test\.html http://www.google.com [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

*note that your RewriteBase will be different than mine.

Now, go to your WordPress site and try to navigate to test.html. It should redirect you to the Google. If not, then mod_rewrite is definitely not working and you need to have your server admin or hosting company fix it.

I found a lot of people with the same issue when I was trying to fix this, but no one seemed to have a solution. Hopefully, this will help.