Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Jan 31, 2009
Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Jan 31, 2009
The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers.
This time we cover: The biggest browser based game sites; A selection
of general game design topics (applicable to Flash, Flex and other dev systems);
Tutorials on AS3 specifically, Box2D, and BitmapData effects; The 4K game
competition; Using Digg to your advantage; Emotion in games; Audio Design, and
much more...
Everything you need to know to become a Video Game Designer
GameDev.net's Tony Nuynh provides the goods in a
very in-depth article.
What are the biggest browser based game sites?
Squize (over at gamingyourway.com) has found the list on Gamasutra.
I feel (I'm not rocket scientist) that browser based 3D (especially Unity) is
going to be the next big thing (or is now). The ranks of bedroom and indie 3D game developers will thin out as the technologies get more expensive and difficult to develop for though. I'd love to see Mochi and GameJacket ads in all browser-based game/multimedia content. That will just help drive up the eCPM for everyone.
On that Note, ComScore has released their online games study
Freelance Flash Games is reporting that ComScore has released their list of the top browser games sites (probably the same data used in the Gamasutra article).
Make a Rhythm Based Game in AS3
Mr. Sun has posted the 7th and final (finishing touches) installment in his series on creating a Rhythm Based game in AS3.
Colby's Programming TidBits - Constraining the MAX Rotation Turn Rate Per Second
Cheezeworld has posted a new, very well done, tutorial on using a Matrix to constrain the amount of rotation an entity can rotate per second or tick.
He has the code library ready for you to use even if you can't understand what is going on.
4K Game Competition
Game Poetry and Urbansqual are
hosting a 30 day 4K game competition. There will be a monetary prize of some
sort (not necessary, but very cool by the way). I have an idea for my entry, and no, there is no way my entire game framework will fit in 4K because I write
code like a bloated bastard. I will have to fly by the seat of my pants on this
one...
Free graphics for use in any game
Urbansqual's
Tim Wendorf has created a free tile sheet of fruit, veggies, food and
other items that can be used in just about any game.
Fatalexception has the
Ultimate Collection of Free Vector Pack.
BOX2D For Absolute Beginners (no Bowie songs included)
Emanuele has
part 1 and
part 2 of his excellent BOX2D tutorials up on his site.
Freeactionscript.com goodness
Freeactionscript.com has
been hard at work lately...
-Dynamic
Bitmap Particle Explosion
-Dynamic
Bitmap Particle Explosion with Gravity
-Dynamic
Bitmap Mouse Trailer with Graviity
-Realistic
Bitmap Smoke Trailer
-Realistic
vertical bitmap smoke trailer
-Using
BitmapData - center Bitmap inside a MovieClip
-Using
BitmapData - Attach an Image Dynamically
And more. Phil has been on fire lately, so check out his ZarJaz.
How to Harness the Power of Digg
You mean there's more to
it than being 13 years old and emailing your Myspace and Facebook friends lists
repeatedly, begging them to digg the story you submitted on how Boba Fett's jet
pack never became cannon in the Star Wars universe? -
Jeff Gorndt
(through Mochiland) tells you how. Speaking of that, go ahead and Digg
this story for me.
Advanced Game Audio Design
Gamasutra's Zachary Quarles
provides an in-depth look at the art of modifying the audioscape volume to
create greater engagement for the player.
Can games be realistic emotional simulators
Find out how
to AI might be designed to emulate human emotion in games
in this Gamasutra feature.
Mark Watson's Free Game Development Books
His work is mostly
centered on Java, but all of his ideas can be translated to AS3.
Practical Artificial Intelligence Programming in Java is a free download or
$21.95 in a printed version. He also have other interesting books in the works
that you can take a look at.
Here are 8bitrocket towers
We have been adding to our dev
diaries on our
Generalized Flex Game Control and our reference app for it called
Micro Robot Maze.
Also we added five games by
Scritpedfun
and New Star
Soccer Trials to our Retro Aracde.
As always, visit Flashgameblogs.com for your daily dose...
Silverlight Game Development Interweb Mash-Up Jan. 30th, 2009
It is still very quiet on the Silverlight game development front this week. However, we will forge through as we believe this platform is going to be very significant very soon.
Microsoft has not added any more games to their Silverlight.net Showcase this week, but the silverlight.net community gallery has added a couple small ones:
- Tic Tac Toe by Lee Saunders is a version of this very simple game, but Lee has included all the code and project files. I look forward to his next experiment in A.I.
- SimpleVB has a cool little "bouncing ball" game reminiscent of many Flash games out there. It shows a lot of promise.
The Mix 2009 10K Smart Coding Challenge Has A ton Of Cool Silverlight Game Entries. The key to the contest is to Make a game in 10K or less. I love stuff like this because it forces programmers to really think about what they are going to to use in their game, and still make it fun.
- Battle Planes is a take on Battleship by Sorin Tarceatu.
- Bubble Mania by Gabriel Nitulescu is in the "Click Like Things Next To Each Other To Make Them Disappear" genre. It's simple, but games like this are always enjoyable.
- Silver Rubix is a great looking Rubiks Cube simulation by Timmy Kokke.
- Spin And Win is a gorgeous slot machine simulator by Grant Archibald
- Warp Jumper, a cool pseudo 3D bouncing ball game from Wian van Aggelen
- Silverhack, Tommi Pirttiniemi's version of Nethack written in Silverlight
There are many more good games too, so check out the full list of entries.
Here is something old, but really cool: Chris Bowen's list of Silverlight Games (some with source code) from last June.
Also, here is a very recent Silverlight vs. Flash game comparison from the masters over at ShineDraw: Snake Snacks Game.
Finally, we launched our own new game written in Silverlight named "Zamboozal Silverlight", based on a game we made 20 years go. You read about it and play it here: http://www.8bitrocket.com/newsdisplay.aspx?newspage=23363
Anyway, that is it for this week. We'll back again next time with even more...
Development Diary – Micro Robot Maze #2
Development Diary - Micro Robot Maze #2
A few weeks back I started to make my Generalized Flex Game engine built around blitting and a
modified Model View Controller / State Machine structure. I needed a reference application to build on top of the engine, so I chose to make a version of the classic
Daleks game.
A couple days ago I wrote about my progress with the game engine. I think I
have most of the bugs ironed out of the 4 main classes used for display, but I
am waiting for the reference app to be complete so I can test it out. I did
post the code for the TileSheet class, but I am holding off of any more code
posts until the game is complete. So, in lieu of more posts on the game engine,
I will be posting my about my progress with the reference application. In case
you are interested, I am going to spend a good deal of time porting the
reference app to other game development languages and systems in an attempt to
learn each (if possible). It doesn't hurt to be well rounded
now-a-days.
Micro Retro Robot Maze
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole
lot to show right now. There is a basic title screen and when the game play
starts, the user can click on any square directly adjacent (up,down,right,or
left, no diagonals yet) to the green hero to move him to that square. This won't
impress anyone, but I will go into the code and design of the system because it
is more complicated (maybe exceedingly so) than it first appears.
The GridButton Class
Each of the 144 grid squares is an
instance of my GridButton class. The GridButton is a class specific to this
game, but it inherits from the com.bitrocket8.game.AnimatedBlitButton. This is a
BlitCanvas child that allows the developer to assign different TileSheets,
BlitObjects, and BlitContainers to the states of a button. Hence, when the mouse
rolls over, out, and is clicked on a grid square, the square changes in
appearance. You can read more about the basics of my
display classes here if you are interested. Since the BlitCanvas is a
child of the the Flash Sprite class, it can dispatch button events and use the
nifty hand-cursor. There should be no way for the user to tell that this
is not simply a 12x12 cell grid of GotoAndStop MovieClips, rather than the set
of 144 BlitCanvas instances using a tile sheet for state look changes.
The grid button instances use this tile sheet for their states:
Custom IDEvent
The game is controlled by one of my VIEW
state classes called ScreenGamePlay. This is a class that controls the look and
actions needed for the actual game to run. Because there are 144 squares,
all with the ability to be clicked, I created a custom event that fires off when
any is clicked called an IDEvent. This event passes the ID of the square back to
the event listener method. The ScreenGamePlay listens for this event and then
checks to see if the square is a valid move for the player.
When the GridButton instances are created, they are all given an _id value that
represents the col_row (x_y to be specific) as a string. When a GridButton is clicked, I check to see
if the move is valid (meaning in a square adjacent to the player). If it is, I check to see what the next col and row will be
for the user. Once that is complete I set the _moving variable of my GridButton
to true and set a dx and dy value. With _moving set to true, on the next frame
tick the update() method of the GridButton (called through an update
event) will apply dx and dy to the nextx and
nexty values of the player. If there was to be collision detection, it would
then be checked using the nextx and nexty values. When the render event fires, the GridButtons set x and y to
be the nextx and nexty respectively and the player sprite is moved accordingly.
The player sprite will then continue to move (and animate) until it reaches the
the next square and stop. Once stopped, it goes back into toe tapping stopped
mode.
The Player class
Just like the GridButtons, the Player class
is derived from my BlitCanvas class. That means it is an actual Sprite that must
be added to the display list (just like grid squares). I did this for simplicity.
The player could have been blitted to a blit layer, but I wanted to test out
creating a BlitCanvas that moved and animated. I will be creating a FX layer to
overlay the grid and player Sprites. This FX layer will be a full blit layer.
This will simply be a BlitCanvas class instance that is the size of the entire play screen.
It will be used for blitting explosions and particles, etc.
The player's look and feel is made up of this set of tiles:
The final two are the STOPPED state where the player waits and taps his foot
while the user decides what his next move will be.
The next steps in the game
I have created a preliminary
tile sheet for the walls, the power-ups and the goal for each level. These are
pretty simple, and are about the best I can do with my limited technical drawing
skill (and time):
The first three tiles are for placement only. I will use Mappy for level
creation and the red squares will represent open, walkable tiles for the player
and the robots. The player tile is used by the level designer (me) to designate the
starting spot for the player in a level. The robot tile is used to place the
starting spots for the robots. The blue walls will be used to add non walkable
tales to the grid. The final 5 tiles of row 4 are the goal tiles for each level. The goal is a little animated tile that the user must get to to finish each
level. Finally, the final yellow/orange tile is a power-up. It gives the user
one bomb and one teleport.
Well, that's what I have so far. Tomorrow I am back to doing a Flash Game
Development Interweb Mash-Up, and hopefully the weekend will afford me some time
to work on this game engine some more.
New Star Soccer Trials added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade
New Star Soccer Trials added to the 8bitrocket Retro Arcade
What a treat to stumble upon Simon Read's first viral Flash game. Created as an advertisement for his incredible New Star Soccer 4, New Star Soccer Trials pits you in the role of squad trainee, competing for a place on the team. The retro look and feel are straight out of Sensible and Kick Off (as well as taken directly from his own NSS3).
What does the author have to say:
Show the coach that you have what it takes to be a football superstar!
by Simon Read (New Star Games)
8bitrocket take:
8bitrocket take: It's no secret that I am a huge fan of the New Star Soccer series of games. I stumbled onto Simon's mini Flash version of some of the training challenges and I haven't been able to put it away since. It has the retro look I loved so much from NSS3 - think Sensi crossed with Kick Off. Anyway, enjoy what I hope will be Si's first of many great retro Flash games. TRY IT!
Read full chapters from the new Atari VCS book, Racing The beam
Read full chapters from the new Atari VCS book, Racing The beam
Steve and I have been following the progress of this book for the last few months. We don't know the authors or have any vested interest in the title. We do though think the idea of taking a deep look inside the VCS as a platform and deeply exploring 6 genre defining games sounds very interesting and exciting (especially for Atari nerds such as ourselves).
MIT press has the PDFs of the 3 chapters available, as well as an easy to use Google Preview version.
After reading the Forward, opening chapter and index, I can't wait for it to come out.
The book is available NOW. It can be ordered from the publishers site and Amazon.com.
Building A Generalized Flex Game Control Part 4 – TileSheet class
Building A Generalized Flex Game Control Part 4 - TileSheet class
In part 1, I discussed and mused over what parts of the MVC pattern (if
any) to implement in my Flex game control.
In part 2, I dug down into my thoughts on the rendering engine and how I
was unable to get anything displayed on the screen before the pipes
burst at my house and I was forced to continue writing this from a
Hotel (now still).
In part 3, I finally got the code of the rendering engine working (not
completely by any means, but working satisfactorily.
In this forth part we will dissect the TileSheet class. This class is the
basic building block for any game made with this engine. It is used to describe
the tile sheet attributes for a particular png file that can be used to fuel the
blitting engine. It takes a BitmapData object as its first parameter, as well as
the width and height of the entire tile sheet and the width and height of a
single til
Before we go any further, why don't we look at my progress so far with the
reference app that I am using to help test and create the general engine. We'll
then show the entire class code and finally discuss how the reference app makes
use of the TileSheet class.
Reference application so far (not much, but I'll explain what we are seeing
later)
The code for the TileSheet Class
[cc lang="javascript" width="550"]
package com.bitrocket8.display{
import flash.display.BitmapData;
/**
* ...
* @author Jeff Fulton
*/
public class TileSheet{
private var _sourcebitmap:BitmapData;
private var _width:int;
private var _height:int;
private var _tilewidth:int;
private var _tileheight:int;
private var _framesperrow:int;
public function TileSheet(sourcebitmap:BitmapData,width:int, height:int, tilewidth:int, tileheight:int ){
_sourcebitmap = sourcebitmap;
_width = width;
_height = height;
_tileheight = tileheight;
_tilewidth = tilewidth;
_framesperrow = int(_width / _tilewidth);
}
public function getsourcebitmap():BitmapData {
return _sourcebitmap;
}
public function setsourcebitmap(val:BitmapData):void {
_sourcebitmap = val;
}
public function getframesperrow():int {
return _framesperrow;
}
public function getwidth():Number {
return _width;
}
public function setwidth(val:Number):void {
_width = val;
}
public function getheight():Number {
return _height;
}
public function setheight(val:Number):void {
_height = val;
}
public function gettilewidth():Number {
return _tilewidth;
}
public function settilewidth(val:Number):void {
_tilewidth = val;
}
public function gettileheight():Number {
return _tileheight;
}
public function settileheight(val:Number):void {
_tileheight = val;
}
}
}
[/cc]
This is a pretty simple class. It is basically a holder for information about
a BitmapData object plus the information needed to use it as a Tile Sheet for
blitting from. Also, we have some access methods for getting and setting the
attributes. After
completing quite a few games using blitting and tile sheets in AS3, I always
found myself painted into a corner when it came to the tiles the represent the
objects in the game. Too often I needed to change the look of the player for
a few seconds or add an overlay on top. These operations always necessitated custom code that
needed to be shoe-horned inline into the render method of my player object based
on some sort of switch or combination of switches.
To combat that problem I started this Generalized Flex Game Control with the
sole purpose of making it much easier to change the state of an object's look
with out a huge set of in-line game specific code. So, for the above reference
app, I first defined the states for the button GO button in a png.
I decided that the first two frames would alternate when the mouse is "off"
of the button. The 3rd, yellow is the "over" state and the 4th, white is the
"click" state.
This TileSheet is embedded into a Main game control view state called
ScreenTitle. (I will delve into this and all of the other classes in detail in
future installments). In Flex, the embed looks like this:
[cc lang="javascript" width="550"]
[Embed(source = "../assets/titlescreen.png")]
private var titlescreenPNG:Class;
[/cc]
Later in the ScreenTitle class, we instantiate the TileSheet with this code:
[cc lang="javascript" width="550"]
private var _gobuttonBitmapSource:Bitmap;
private var _gobuttonTS:TileSheet;
_gobuttonBitmapSource = new gobuttonPNG();
_gobuttonTS = new TileSheet(_gobuttonBitmapSource.bitmapData, 400, 50, 100, 50);
[/cc]
Now our TileSheet is ready for use. In the next part of this series we will
explain the BlitContainer class as it currently stands and go into detail on how
the 3 button states are created, updated and rendered.
When you click the [Go] button in the above reference application, you will
be taken to the first game screen in Micro Robot Maze. All of the squares in
this grid are blitted from a single TileSheet also. This grid makes use of some
sub classes of my BlitCanvas class that add in the ability for them to pass
their ID back in a custom click event. In that way, we can easily tell which
square was clicked. Anyway, that is getting ahead of the current lesson. This
was a the direst short tutorial in a series of digestible bites that we will
take while developing this engine over time.
Play Retro DOS Games Easily on your Mac (or PC, but not as easily)
Play Retro DOS Games Easily on your Mac (or PC, but not as easily)
The ultra cool DOSBox software has been available for the Mac (as well as Windows and Linux platforms for a while now), but I always had a little trouble getting some of my favorite games to work : Raptor, Wolf 3d, Doom, Halloween Harry, etc can all be made to work with a decent knowledge of the software settings and a little patience. I have always lacked the necessary time to play with it and get them to work until now.
Now, with the help of Boxer, built on top of DosBox, you can very easily play almost any DOS game on your Mac.
Just install the app by dragging it to your applications folder (or any folder really) and it will be ready to use. It comes with 4 demo games: Commander Keen 4, Epic Pinball Demo, Ultima Underworld demo, and the X-Com UFO Defense Demo. All are playable right out of the box (so to speak). You can easily find links to 100's more demo and full games (IP released by the owners only of course). These are easily installed by simply dragging the folder of game install files to the Boxer "Drop games here to install them" program.
I found the demo of a Wolf 3d engine created game called Blake Stone. It plays in a large window on my iMac, but here it in a small window (good for web consumption).
I have spent a little too much time playing with this wonderful app. Anyone who misses those days gone by, or who never experienced them should try out Boxer (Mac) or DosBox (PC).
Zamboozal Silverlight 1.0 Launches : Plus Hosting Silverlight Games with .ASP.NET 2.0 MasterPages
Excuse me for being a bit nostalgic, but tomorrow is my birthday. Actually, since my brother Jeff and I are twins, it is both our birthday's. Anyhow, nearly 20 years ago Jeff and I created our first real "finished" and compiled object code game (we had made many games in various BASIC languages for many years prior) named Zamboozal Poker Dice.
Jeff and I were always big fans of a certain "dice" game that had been around for centuries, but had been branded by Milton Bradly i nthe early 20th century. However, at the time we felt we could do it one better. So we aded some new options likeone Pair, two pair, and Blackjack and bonuses.
So, when I started building a my first "real" game in Silverlight, I decided to take inspiration from this old game. Sure, it is simply a recreation of an existing old game, but for a short two week development cycle while I was trying to learn the intricacies of a new language and platform, it seemed like a good idea. So, in all it's basic glory, here is Zamboozal Silverlight
Right off the bat you will notice that a many things have changed, while a few things have stayed the same. First, I kept our original title screen. Even though it is amazingly bad, it fits the game perfectly. However, since I wanted to get this game finished, I dropped some of special effects from the original game. I figured that those would be well used as examples in other games that I build down the line in my Silverlight development.
To be honest, Zamboozal Silverlight does not really tax Silverlight's animation features. It's really just a tech demo of how I might build a game in the future. While it might not look like much at first, under the covers I tackled the following problems (all of which might appear as individual tutorials in the coming weeks)
- Creating a game loop interval
- Creating a simple game state machine
- Loading and displaying bitmap images
- Loading and playing sounds
- Managing dynamic colors in code
- Creating and a managing multiple custom controls in code.
- Creating custom events and event listeners
- Implementing a subscriber design pattern
- Generating random numbers for multiple class objects
For me the above was enough for a first game. My next step is to create a Flash version based on the class structure, sounds and graphics used for this game and show the differences in the code.
OK, now to the small "tutorial" for this entry. Embedding Silverlight apps in ASP.NET with MasterPages.
When I initially tried to launch this game and its predecessor "Guess The Number", I was confounded because while the Silverlight app showed-up perfectly in a .HTML page, in and ASP.NET 2.0 page with a MasterPage, it would come-up as complete BLANK. For ASP.NET 3.5 there is a Silverlight Control you can use to embed, but for 2.0 you are left-up to the simple object embed. However, the default embed supplied by Visual Studio when you build your Silverlight app will not work in a MasterPage. Here is an example:
<object data="data:application/x-silverlight," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%">
<param name="source" value="DiceGame.xap"/>
<param name="onerror" value="onSilverlightError" />
<param name="background" value="white" />
<param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="2.0.31005.0" />
<param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=124807" style="text-decoration: none;">
<img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108181" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style: none"/>
</a>
</object>
The above looks fine and will display in HTML, but as-is it will not display anything in an ASP.NET 2.0 page with a MasterPage. However, the fix is quite simple,but not documented any place I could find. To fix the display problem, you must explicitly state the height and width of your Silverlight app, and get rid of the width="100%" height="100%. Here is what I did:
<object data="data:application/x-silverlight," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="500" height="500">
<param name="source" value="DiceGame.xap"/>
<param name="onerror" value="onSilverlightError" />
<param name="background" value="white" />
<param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="2.0.31005.0" />
<param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" />
<a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=124807" style="text-decoration: none;">
<img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=108181" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style: none"/>
</a>
</object>
That's it. A simple fix to a very frustrating problem.
Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Jan 23, 2009
Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: Jan 23, 2009
The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers.
This time we cover: Flashgamedistribution.com in beta; New PixelBlitz features and demos; A new Mochi contest; tips for protecting your high scores; How to get Flex FP10 and Eclipse to play well together; How to use Google OpenSocial with Flash games; plus a bunch of tutorials, and more.
FlashGameDistribution.com (Beta)
If you are interested in joining the beta for the new game distribution service provided by the team behind FlashGameLicense, then hop on over there and sign up. This service is very much needed and hopefully it will become a method that can alleviate game devs from having to spend countless hour submitting their games to portals only to be ignored or rejected 90% of the time - now we can be ignored and rejected without much work =). I hope the service actually improves the situation, and given the people behind it, I am exited at the possibilities.
Also, for those interested in such statistics (me), FreelanceFlashGames has posted some interesting erata statisics on FlashGameLicense. For example, did you know that average sponsor view for games that have sold on FGL is 54, while the average sponsor view for all games is 28? With a couple of my games hovering just over the 12 mark, I can understand why I scramble pay for hosting this site (make better games, Jeff, DUH!)
PixelBlitz is Crankin'
Rich Davey has been putting a lot of time lately into the Norm Soule released PixelBlitz game engine. He has an impressive shoot'em'up demo running and has been adding features to the engine such as integration with Box2D. You can check out the engine and all of the updates at the PixelBlitz.org site.
How To Get Flash 10 For Flex to Work in Eclipse
Mark G (IckyDime) has a nice new how to on setting up Eclipse to target the Flash 10 player.
Make A Vertical Shooter in AS2
Mr. Sun has posted the final installment of his six part series on making a classic vertical shooter in AS2. It is a well done series, and I am sure there will be quite a few Mochi clones of this floating around soon.
4 Good Tips For Protecting the High Score In You Game
I have them memorized now, but you will have to visit Freelanceflashgames to find out what I know and you don't (yet).
Applying Recursive Development to Games
No, I don't mean writing a recursive algorithm for a Tetris or Match 3 game (that would make a good tutorial though, hmm). I mean hopping over to Game Poetry and checking out the post on using recursion to actually develop your games. The core idea is that any large game is made up of many smaller medium sized games, and each of those medium sized games is made up of a series of smaller games. It is little like using a BSP tree or a grid for collision detection but applied to the game development process (my words, not theirs. They are much more eloquent that I ever could be).
Designing the structure of a Flash AS3 game (The Italian Way)
Emanuele has posted the third part in his series on designing the structure of a Flash AS3 game. He also has a really really nice new header graphic and logo, and he has also been experimenting with selling his own in-game banner ads. It seems to be working out well for him. For example, SamePhysics has Mochi ads at the beginning AND a banner ad inside the game during game play.
A Simple Method to Target The Closest Enemy MC in a Game
Freeactionscript has a demo and .fla if you have the need. Also, check out the simple Flash Light Effect. Pretty sweet.
Video Turorial on MovieClip Communication
Flashgameu.com has a nice video tutorial on on communicating between movieclips in AS3.
Use Google OpenSocial to socialize your Flash games
DevX.com has a great tutorial on using the Javascript API to add social features into your games.
The Mochi World of 3D Contest
Mochimedia and Freespin 3D have teamed up for a contest with some attractive prizes. To qualify, your game must use the Freespin API, and incorporate the Mochi Version Control and encryption services.
As always, visit Flashgameblogs.com for your daily dose...
Silverlight Game Development Interweb Mash-Up : Jan 21st, 2009
Silverlight Game Development Interweb Mash-Up : Jan 21st, 2009
Things are still a bit slow on the Silverlight game development side, but we plan to help liven things up with this weekly column devoted to all things tagged GAME in the world of Microsoft's Silverlight 2 platform.
The first is this nice multi-part game development tutorial from developer Joel Neubeck (http://joel.neubeck.net/) named Developing a Casual Game with Siverlight 2. Joel is already up to part 3, but here is short run-down of his previous (and current) modules:
- Module 1: Getting Started ' Architecture / framework
- Module 2: Movement and collision detection
- Module 3: Design ' Sprites, boards and dialogs
The full series promises to be quite a watershed set of instructional tutorials, and it would be wise to get in on this one as soon as possible.
Another interesting item on Silverlight.net is the Balder3D game engine. The last update was in October of 2008, but this seems like a very interesting project that we will continue to follow.
ShineDraw.com is a site dedicated to comparing Flash to Silverlight. The quality of the work on this site is very high. Although there is not a lot of game content, most of the examples here could be used for multiple game projects.
Silverlight Switch is yet another site dedicated to moving from Flash to Silverlight.
Microsoft has added a ton of new content to their Silverlight Showcase this week including these games:
- Power Arrow : A target practice game that, honestly I could not get to work for me.
- Hook Shot : A free throw shooting game wit ha nice physics model by Spritehand who have some other interesting games like Destroy All Invaders (a simple base shooter) and Silverlight Rocks (a simple Asteroids style game)
On the personal front, our first entry in the Flash To Silverlight series was highlighted on the Channel 9 TCS Weekly blog on msdn which was really cool. You can listen to the podcast with our shout-out here. It is inspiring to be recognized by the Silverlight community after just a couple short weeks into developing for the platform. It makes us want to continue at double-speed. Thanks Channel 9.
We also put up the second in the series, a very short and focused discussion about random numbers, and we will soon have another where we compare building a poker-dice game in both Silverlight and Flash AS2.
Anyway, that is it for this week. If you have any news, blogs, games, etc. that you think we should highlight in our weekly Mash-Up, please send them to info@bitrocket.com or leave a comment below.