· Ada Romita
She created Arthur's 3D model and animated the walking sequence.

· Francesco Guarnaccia
He composed all the music for the game.

· Grace Milstein
She helped me a great deal, looking up on the internet for sound effects which I would later edit and use in the game.
She also designed the game's website (www.goldyard.net).

· Paolo Strano
He implemented the high score table using ASP technology.

· Stefano de Marchi
He implemented the same high score table using pearl for those servers that don't support ASP.

- describe the most important features of the game

I think the most important features are the ones that may seem more obvious to the player, but that are not common to see around in Flash games, at least at the time Gold Yard was published. What I'm honestly proud of most is the general gameplay, that I wanted to be as smooth as possible, trying to give the player sort of an "arcade videogame" feeling.

I tried to make the game run at 30 fps all the time even on a machine as "slow" as a 400MHz Celeron (you know, minimum requirements for Flash games are generally much higher than those of games made with lower level programming languages) because the player had to feel the game is promptly responding to her input at any time and all the animations had to run as smoothly as possible.

Another important feature that I decided to implement to improve playability is what I called the "don't get stuck" algorithm. When the hero walks into a door frame, for example, he's taken automatically to the closest opening in the wall, which is the door itself. Or, if the hero bumps into a coffin in the middle of a room, he doesn't get stuck into it, but walks around it automatically (provided the player is still pressing the key to make the hero walk) moving towards the nearest end of the coffin.

Gold Yard also features an isometric engine designed so that each room can have unique graphics and doesn't have to necessarily be created out of pre-designed "graphic blocks", like many games of this genre. That gives me more freedom when it comes to designing a room.
Also, thanks to the hitTest function available in Flash 5, I implemented another nice feature, collision detection against curved walls, that allowed me to expand some design limitations when it came to designing new rooms.

- what version of flash was used for the developement ?

I started using Flash 4, and the core engine of the game is indeed made only using Flash 4 instructions. But, while Gold Yard was still in an intermediate stage of developing, Macromedia released Flash 5, which I both cursed and loved. :) I cursed it because I was just starting to feel familiar with Flash 4 Actionscript and I had to begin to study the new language all over again! I loved it because Flash 5 ActionScript introduced some really cool new functions (like the elusive hitTest) that made it possible to implement features that would have not been there otherwise (like collision-detection against curved walls).

- how much time did it take to finish the whole project ?

Oh, that's a question lots of people have asked me since I published Gold Yard. I took an awesome lot of time, I can tell you that. I don't know exactly how long, but it surely took 7 or 8 months of my spare time to get to the first final version.

- which were the most difficult problems you had to overcome?

Probably the most difficult problem to overcome was to find the time to finish Gold Yard. Like I told you before, it required so much time that once I had to stop the project because I realized it was sucking up too much of my spare time. You know, when you already have a full-time job (not to mention a girlfriend) there isn't much time to indulge yourself in fancy projects. I eventually undertook the project some months later and finished it, but that was after quitting my full time job.

- how long does it take to finish the game ? how many levels does it have?

It may typically take from 10 to 20 minutes, which is quite short if compared to regular PC games. But for a zero budget, zero profit game I think that's good enough, considering also that it all started as an experiment. Gold Yard currently features 26 rooms but I'm planning to release a new version soon with 15 extra rooms (a whole flooded underground cave).

- do you have a wishlist of features for the next version of Macromedia Flash?

Well, I'd like the next version to ship with an extra monitor and a dual-video graphic board because of the overwhelming amount of windows and palettes you need to have on the screen at the same time :-)
Seriously, as far as it goes with the Actionscript language I don't have any particular wish, although I think that the most welcome feature people at Macromedia could grace us with is a serious boost of the Flash Player speed. I think Flash internal programming language is already powerful enough to make games as complex as a Game Boy Advance average title.

What we need now is the speed necessary to handle multiple animated AI driven characters, fluidly scrolling backgrounds, real time 3D worlds (rendered with Flash internal drawing APIs) and other such videogamish features.

- next flash game projects ?

As I said before, I'm planning to expand Gold Yard to give the player a longer game experience. Also I'm working on a fully customizable isometric Flash engine for people who just want to design their games without having to worry too much about technical and programming issues. Another project that I left behind (for the moment at least) is an isometric pac-man-like videogame featuring an external level editor. Carrying on new projects as an individual or even a small team is (unfortunately) all about time & money. If you have enough time and somebody who financially supports you, you can really make some beautiful piece of software.