Hi everybody!
Even if a little too late, we want to wish you Merry Christmas and most of all an Happy New Year!
And now, let's see the news since the last gotoAndPlay() News Letter!

The Games section has been updated in its contents, look and performance.

As regards look and performance: due to the high number of games we host, the size of the games index page was too huge and the time needed for its complete download was too long, expecially on slower connections.
Now the new page is divided in three sections: the first one, on the left, contains a box for login purposes, a box with the games top ten and a box for advertisement purposes; the second section, on the top right, contains the links to the Dick Dynamite games.
The third section contains the text links to the games: the games listed are the last five entries for each game type, and the screenshots shown are randomly selected among those five (a yellow arrow tells which one). A click on the "Full list" button opens a new page which lists all the games for the selected game type.

As regards the content 19 new games were added, reaching the total number of 34 high quality games. The new entries, since the last news letter, are:

	Crystal Eater	by Danny
	Sky Attack	by Danny
	Columns	by Roberto Valdunciel, alias Rober
	M3 - Minnim Master Mind	by :minnim
	Blackjack	by Marcelo Volmaro
	Blocks	by Marcelo Volmaro
	Pazzo Francesco	by Marcelo Volmaro
	Flashxed	by Marcelo Volmaro
	Artillery	by Martyn Williams, alias twitchymart
	Hobort	by Val A. Burov, alias Fospher
	Boxworld	by Roberto Valdunciel, alias Rober
	Asteroids	by Paul Neave

And don't forget the new Dick Dynamite: Xmas Edition 2003, just released some days ago!
As usual. you can play them all HERE

Also the gotoAndPlay() Articles section was improved with a bunch of intermediate / high level articles and prototypes, which explore different aspects of the game development in ActionScript.

What's new in the Articles section:

• Magnetos shows how to shoot while moving a sprite in different directions;
• from Leight, two versions of an open-source art-based platform games engine he has developed;
• a prototype written by Lapo about real world physics simulation in Flash games, shows the concept of friction;
• always from Lapo, a long article covering the interaction between client and server using socket connection, a very popular technique used for turn-based and realtime multiuser games;
• a series of four prototypes developed by Andrè Michelle show: collision checking with bezier curves; 3D simulation in Flash, also with vectorial textures; a simplified pathfinding tecnique, less precise but more performant than A*;
• another article written by Lapo, showing how to better organize your code in games engines using ActionScript 2 features.

You can check these tutorials and prototypes in our Articles section

Two new spotlight interviews have been published.

The first one was about SayDesign, which has recently won the third prize in the "RealOne Arcade 2003 Game Showdown" with an addictive flash game called "Jammed Again". We had a long interview with John Say from SayDesign, asking him to talk about their game, Flash, web gaming and a lot more.

The second interview was about Extrajetzt, whose guys have recently released an addicting 3D racing game called "Fast Froots" featuring a stunning actionscript engine that brings pseudo-3D graphix to the Flash player.

Also the new Spotlight issue is almost ready... stay tuned!

Thanks to your support our gaming community is growing day by day. We are always in search for new ideas and contributions to share with other passionate Flash gamers and developers...
The place to post your games, articles, tutorials, prototypes, ideas, questions… is always the same: info@gotoandplay.it!

That's all, folks! See you next month!

the gotoAndPlay() team