Yep. Just as I was about to start coding the AI for ninjaman tonight, I realised a huge problem in the game. The screen really doesnt display a wide enough perspective of the game – to the point that if i was to run right at full speed, the time it would take for an enemy to first appear till the time they were right under the player – was 0.6 seconds. It honestly felt like an ambush, continually. This is huge problem.. There are three directions we can take here:
One, keep it as is and ultimately screw up the gameplay. Enemies that are meant to attack from ‘a distance’ will look like they are firing a cannon at you from point blank
Two, reduce the size of everything – characters and later levels alike – to 75% or so. Reduce the running speed to compensate too. Reduce the vertical height of the game hence factoring in a wide aspect feeling. This thus results in a speed up, but everything looks mini man style..
Three, push the engine even further and widen gameplay up by 33% to 640×360. This gives a wide aspect, and some performance loss. The nicest solution and yet the slowest.
Flash sucks because solution 3 runs too slow, yet its the nicest option. Ninjaman looks so sweet in widescreen, 16:9 aspect, with full size players. We’re just going to have to cut back on detail with the maps…
Which brings me to the other revelation of the night. Stephen suggested we have a realtime feature to reduce the graphical load. While this isnt as easy as dropping poly counts in real time – as our objects are just flat images that either exist or dont – we could elect for some objects not to be drawn. The conclusion is we may have a ’smoothest gameplay’ and ‘best graphics’ choice for the player – in which the game makes a recommendation based on a hidden benchmark when it loads or something. In ’smoothest gameplay’ (ie low quality), most background objects aren’t drawn, eg sails on a ship. All mid-plane objects are drawn as they effect gameplay, but fore and back objects may not be. In ‘best graphics’ (ie high quality), every thing is drawn. Might be workable…
So what system makes the cut for high quality? At the moment I’d say any PC with a 2ghz processor should run high quality fine. Anyone under that on a wintel machine; low quality. With macs its more harsh: G5s for high quality, anything less for low – flashplayer mac blows hard, but that’s well known. Flash can suck at times…
Here’s hoping flash player 8 rocks 
/end rant