Updating My Jigsaw Puzzle Site

So I decided several months ago to change my Jigsaw Puzzles site from using Shockwave to Flash. The Shockwave version is a patched, updated version of my original jigsaw puzzle game from back in 1998 or thereabouts. But with fewer and fewer people having Shockwave installed, and Shockwave still not working on Intel Macs, I decided to see if I can make a game just as good in Flash.

Now Flash added bitmap manipulation some time ago. But it was slow. But with Flash 9 and AS3, I found I could cut out jigsaw pieces even faster in Flash than in Shockwave. So there is really no reason to use Shockwave for this at all.

The encapsulated environment (movie clips inside movie clips) made it even easier to build. So it only took me a few days.

The interesting thing is the player reaction. I updated the site, and put links on top of the page to use the old Shockwave version and to send feedback. I got an overwhelming amount of feedback, and met some people that have been playing the daily jigsaw puzzle for years.

But of course, people don’t like change. Some of the comments were useful suggestions, or telling me about some feature of the old game that was missing from the new one. But a lot of people just didn’t like it because it is new. I’ve seen this before, and have always found it frustrating.

Another interesting thing is that a handful of people have complained that the game simply doesn’t appear. So, they must not have Flash, or at least Flash 9. But I am using the JavaScript code from the Flash 9 publish function, and it should detect, using JavaScript, that they don’t have Flash and give them a message. But apparently, for some people, it doesn’t do anything. So I added my own code to display the Flash version on the page and a link to download Flash. But it is worth nothing that there are still a lot of people out there that have trouble using Flash.

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