Show And Tell: Terry Paton

Welcome to Show and Tell, a regular feature where we speak to indie devs about what they’re working on and what they’re releasing soon. Today we speak with Flash developer Terry Paton, who has made a living through making indie games for himself and others.

Can you introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about your studio?
My name is Terry Paton and I’m a Flash Game Developer. I work for myself, earning my living partly from my games and partly from client work. I have made over 100 personal Flash games (and I’ve made around 50 for clients, too).

I’ve worked with Flash making games for around eight years, working alone with my personal games, though recently I’ve started collaborating with others.

I have games out for the iPad, Android Phones, BlackBerry Playbook, and pretty much all my games are also online, free to play in a browser.

What game are you working on at the moment?
I’ve actively been working on three games recently and a few other side projects. My major work has been using the GPU accelerated Flash Player coming soon (called ‘Stage3D’ or ‘Molehill’), via a framework called ‘Flare3D’.

To put some perspective into why I’m working with this, I’ll backtrack a little. About a year and a half ago I started reaching a frustration point with Flash: performance bottlenecks were really becoming an issue, limiting the games I could make. I began looking at some alternatives, specifically tools that allowed multiple platform publishing. I experimented quite a bit and still felt a little frustrated that if I left Flash all the nuances of the platform that I’d learned to deal with would be gone, and I’d be starting from scratch learning how to deal with new problems. It’s around this time that while I was attending the annual Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles last year, they announced GPU acceleration in the form of Stage3D.

This led me to experiment with various frameworks that tapped in to this new acceleration available to Flash, finally settling on using the Flare3D framework to test out making a game with. This game is Robot Arena, a simple game, pulling inspiration from a classic game on orisinal.com. I’ve designed the game with the intent of it being played on a touch screen device, as well as on the web and I feel it plays well in both formats.

I made Robot Arena as a 2D game, faking 3D effects, as the shift into using Stage3D and Flare3D was quite a learning curve. I wanted to keep things as close to what I knew with my first steps into this area. Robot Arena is ready, but not yet released. Here’s a video showing how it’s come out.