Birchlabs.co.uk

Purpose

Birchlabs presents the hobby projects of Alex and Jamie Birch.

Mostly these include the Flash games that we built during our childhood. We also make:

History

Birchlabs.co.uk's first incarnation was as a simple HTML-only website in 1998. As the site grew better, so did its content. Proper games were introduced - ones made in Flash, which could interact with the user's mouse and keyboard.

They started off basic. Stick Shoot was comprised of cleverly-placed buttons and animations, but had no real engine. The Box and Cave Escape were challenging endurance games, but still used very basic code.

As time went on, these games started to get more and more advanced. Invasion 1 got a Daily 5th Place Award on Newgrounds. Invasion 3 got a Daily 2nd Place and over 79,000 views, thanks to the artwork of Kortex (wildfiredesigns.net).

But the Invasion series left much to be desired. For a strategy game, it wasn't as tactical as it should've been. We started to work on Commando instead.

Starting as a simple battle simulator, Commando grew into a very advanced RTS, with Commando 2 getting Daily 5th Place and 39,000+ views on Newgrounds, and Commando 3 being our first Newgrounds Daily Feature, with over 140,000 views and 10,000 lines of code.

The Birchlabs.co.uk of today continues to archive our legacy of Flash games. The plain-text site redesign will enable mobile users to enjoy the website.

My favourite game here is Commando 3; it implements powerful RTS mechanics despite being a "coffee break" game. Invasion 5 is the most technically interesting game here (see Experiments).
— Alex

Styling: Matthew Blode's Marx CSS