I was one of the users who participated in last month's Flash Forward Jam. My entry was Delivery Defense, a game that plays like laserdisc games from the 80s with a few of my characters.

The artwork for the game was very rough, and this was the very first Jam I participated in. But on the day the results came out, I was very surprised and excited when I saw that I managed to snag 3rd place for "Movies with Interactive Elements". I'm very thankful to @tomfulp , the judges, and everyone who played!

I first heard about the jam back in December when the initial donation by @Dungeonation was made, and I read that it would be heavily based in Actionscript 2. At that point I had little to no knowledge of the language and programming in general, but since I doodle a lot in Flash 8 I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn and experiment.

After a few ideas I settled on a game that works like those laserdisc games, like Dragon's Lair and Cliff Hanger (One that, surprisingly, uses footage from the Lupin III series) where a movie plays, and the player needs to respond to prompts to progress. I'm currently studying to be a traditional animator and I thought it would be a simple enough concept to learn to program.

Flash's "actions" panel and some online documentation actually made some basic interactivity very easy to pick up, and I was able to cobble together a basic system very quickly.

The sudden boost in online delivery apps over this pandemic I thought could be involved a little bit with the story, I've been ordering from them a lot lately, probably more than I should. So I plucked a character of mine, Frederick the Fennec, a goofy looking fox whose design was inspired by 60s cartoon characters, and made him a delivery driver for one of those services. The angry restaurateur I'll call Mr. Weasél, a character I originally envisioned as a con-man before this game, but I guess is now a mob boss too. I made a storyboard where Frederick gets into a situation where he gets chased by goons, and has to evade them.

The finished animation was completed within four days. I mean its rough-looking as hell but damn I was so happy I was actually able to do it.

I'd actually like to share some storyboard/animatic-ed sequences that I had to cut to reach the deadline, they might be hard to read so I'll write a short description underneath:

Frederick flips off the goons, but drives over the divider. The player has to react to a prompt so he avoids the oncoming car. With his car leaning to the side, he gets up and the madman kicks it back upright.

On a side note, I tried to make his car in the game look like a Triumph Spitfire.

This is would have been the most climactic sequence of the game and I was a bit sad to cut it. Frederick flies out of the smoke of an explosion and rolls off the highway down a cliff. Falling, he has to climb up his car, and reaches the goons' van and has a stand off with one. He goes in for a punch, and knocks the guy off. The soda can bit and the falling-off-a-cliff were kept, on the upside.

I never would have though so quickly my silly game would get 800 views. To me as an artist, whose illustration isn't even the best, really shows how much of an awesome community and platform this site has, thank you guys so much.

And to add: Flash/Animate is an incredibly powerful software, and I hope it can maintain some kind of relevancy going forward with the help of Ruffle.