My initial thinking was to code on the fly and put together something simple – I wanted physics and the ability to render a 3D version. It only took a couple of experiments to realise that trying to write AND compile in a strict 3 minutes would be near impossible. I needed some assets and wanted to produce these in the allotted time too.

While cogitating the pitch, I had a lot of game commissions and ideas come through my desk. I clicked that a Game Scratchpad would be a really handy app. Something that I could sketch out a game with – to demonstrate an idea during a brainstorm – at the speed of thought.

More on the Game Sketchpad in Part#2. See the last two minutes of the pitch here (not sure what happened to the first minute):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLiKTdB89AA

In the meantime, I got asked by quite a few about the transition effect I used on my slides. To save time I did all of my presentation from within a swf. I wanted a fun quirky transition. The Genie (Ginny) effect is newish – I’d spotted it on wonderfl.net by Clockmaker (inspired by Fladdict). So I grabbed the method and adapted it to allow me to fire it off from a given point – connecting relevant sprites (humorous and tasteless in good measure).

I have packaged the Genie effect here as a Class, with example implementation.

//Usage
import com.swingpants.effect.GenieBmd
var gb:GenieBmd=new GenieBmd(400,300,20)// image width, height, number of segments
gb.startGenie(bmd) // Bitmapdata
gb.fireAtPoint(50,100,3) //x, y, speed (in secs)

Swingpant's AS3 Genie Effect implementation

In part#2 I will explain how the Game Sketchpad works, the component parts, the swf and some source code.

Genie Effect (zip): source
Presentation (Youtube): video