If you know 8bitrocket.com then you know we love Flash games. You also know that we love retro games. You also know that we love retro-evolved games, and that we love to interview and gleen game development knowledge from the masters and creators of the genre, the 8-bit and 16-bit programmers for systems like the Atari 2600, atari 800 and Atari ST. Last week we were please to find out a "perfect storm" was brewing along these lines, and was visiting our site. Steve Woita, A genuine Atari 2600 programmer not only contacted us, but told us that he was using our tutorials and information to help make his own Flash games. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING could be more exciting to us than to have one of our heroes not only contact us, but treat us like peers in this odd and fascinating journey through the world of Flash games.

lash Indie Game Interweb Mash-up: March 9, 2010: Flash Gaming Summit Edition

The 2010 Flash Gaming Summit was a great day all around (with a few strange exceptions). Today's mash-up will be based on things we saw and people we met during this long day

Who we met:

Untold Entertainment
During a couple of the presentations there was one dude who kept asking some pretty "hard-hitting" questions. For example, he asked Joel from Addicting Games why his content has adult themes but is targeted at children. Ada Chen also seem to not want to say anything on record to him. He turned out to be Ryan Henson Creighton of Untold Entertainment. Ryan (like everyone else) turned out to by quite a nice dude. He had an iPhone demo app he tried to show us, but somehow we got distracted in any case it was good to meet him. Ryan, let's talk further about that one. I have two new Objective C books that I am going through right now...

The Push Button Engine
Ben Garney (pretty tall dude) was there doing a talk on his amazing Push Button Engine (Flash game development framework/engine). We didn't get to see his panel discussion as we were stuck taking notes on some other presentations (I'll get to those in a minute). We did get to talk to Ben for a few minutes as we waited for the ill-fated ride to the over-crowded after party. I think I will have to take some time and build something with his engine soon and test it out. I feel very late in the game on this one... [more]

oday a couple stories arose that, on the surface seem to point to some troubles for Flash, but maybe not yet for flash game developers.

The first comes via PC World: Virgin America Ditches Flash on Its Site . It looks like the Virgin Airline site has decided to remove Flash content so that the site is better suited for iPhone users. It's a bit frustrating to hear about this, but at the same time it makes sense. Why did they use Flash in the first place? For UI or animations of planes flying? For an airline wen site, you'd expect to get information as fast and easily as possible, so HTML should be standard.

I can see this as troubling trend...(more after the jump)

utorial: AS3: How to Blit an animation from a tile sheet embedded at compile time

Today we are going to look at how to use a tile sheet embedded into an AS3 project at compile time.We will cover the embedding, instantiation, and actual usage of the tile sheet to do a simple blit canvas animation. I am currently working on a scrolling re-make of the classic Atari 2600 game, Sky Diver. I have started to create my own simple 8-bit styled tile sheet for the game. I only have the first three preliminary tiles created for the player sprite's free-fall animation. Here is the tile sheet so far:

The sheet is actually 10 tiles wide (320 pixels) by 2 tiles high (64 pixels). The tiles are 32x32 in size. We are only using three tiles so far, but there is room for many more if we need them. We will start to build a simple class that will demonstrate using this sheet for animating the character using a classic blit technique...[more]

lash Indie Game Interweb-Mash-Up: March 1, 2010

First off, Steve and I will be at the Flash Gaming Summit next Monday, so I hope to put a few faces to names, etc.

Ning Community
8bitrocket is now part of the Ning community social platform. We did this to help create a community to support the upcoming book release and also give us something else to keep us from interacting socially with our families..

Gaming Your Way's iPhone/CS5 hints
Check out the incredible list of iPhone / CS5 hints that Squize has posted from his experience creating "Zap" for the platform using the beta tools. The cool thing (for me) is that our book covers much of this ground work even though it doesn't have anything really to do with iPhone development. Its just the way I make my games anyway (for the most part).

By the way, if you have not tried the incredible, Ionic, please do yourself a favor. You are in for a treat.

Also, check out the enlightening interview with Barry White of GamesChart.

How to Save a Movie Clip as a PNG
Richard Davey has the goods...[more]

"Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website."

oll: Poll: How Irritated Are You Tech Pundits Who don't Understand Flash?

Here is a good example of a popular tech pundit who talks about Flash, but doesn't seem to understand it.  Bob Cringely, I guy I have respected and followed for more than decade, has weighed in on the Flash/HTML 5 topic with some boneheaded statements:

"Flash always picked up where the browser left off, but it can’t talk to your webcam, store local files, or draw pixels directly to your screen."

WTF? Flash can do all those things (if you include Air for storing local files...something you DO NOT want your browser doing anyway).

Cringely is well respected, but it looks like he doesn't do any %&$*! research before he blows his tech wad into his blog.  After 10 years of blogs, I'm done with him. 

Anyway, please take this poll now:  (did I sway your vote?)

How Irritated Are You Tech Pundits Who don't Understand Flash?

ew 8bitrocket Game Release: Tunnel Panic

Tunnel Panic is the first game from the Essential Flash Games book to be released into the wild in a viral fashion. It's self sponsored (by the book of all things). The original version of this game is featured in chapter 12 of the EFG Book as a way to demonstrate viral Flash games. In this chapter we build a simple game in a few hours and then explain how to add Mochi ads and leader boards to the game. We also go into detail on sponsorships and discuss our friends at FlashGameLicense.com and their offerings in detail.

n this set of tutorials, we will explore how the HTML Canvas relates to Flash developers.

So, the first question to answer about the HTML 5 Canvas appears to be this:

"What The #@*! Is The HTML 5 Canvas?"

The short answer is this:

It is an area on a web page set-aside to display and manipulate bit-mapped pixels in "immediate" mode. "Immediate" mode is a way to draw pixels that gives a programmer ultimate control, but requires the screen objects to be tracked and be redrawn entirely in code. You create it with the <canvas></canvas> HTML tag, and you manipulate it with JavaScript. The Canvas is a window into a bitmapped world that, until recently, only existed with plug-ins like Silverlight , Java ,and of course Flash. The Canvas is currently supported (in part) in the latest versions of Firefox, Opera, and Chrome, but not Internet Explorer

Today we announce the launch of a set of 20 games that took us less than 40 hours to complete:

The World's Worst Jigsaw Puzzle Collection

We have noticed that many developers create very simple jigsaw puzzles and launch them with Mochi ads. While this is a legitimate way to make some pennies, we've also noticed that, more often than not, these developers use (allegedly) stolen images from major corporations (i.e Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.). It's difficult to compete with that kind of I.P., even if it is not legitimate. Mochi does not remove games with I.P. concerns unless they get a complaint about them. they have to do this because they cannot know the legal situation of every game or piece of art in their system.

Since there is no way we could make "good" puzzles to compete with this, we decided to make "bad" puzzles. In fact, we decided to base our puzzles on some of the worst, most mundane, and boring subjects we could imagine. We came up with 20 different topics, and each one became a different game. Here they are:

#1: Some of the dirty dishes I had to do last night. (seriously)


#2: Shades Of My Favorite Color (it's a surprise!)


(18 more after the jump)

utorial (AS3): Using Fonts Embedded At Compile-Time

I am continuing to explore the use of external assets embedded at compile time in AS3. Today we will look at how to embed and use a font in this manner. The Embed compile-time directive is available to users of the Flex SDK, Flex Builder, Flash Builder (if and when it comes out), and Flash IDE users (CS4 and beyond).

First, let's find a font

To test this properly you might want to use a font that you do not already have installed. I went to SearchFreeFonts.com and found a nice font that is free for commercial use (this isn't really a commercial use as I lose my shirt on this site, but just in case...). The name of the font is :01-10-00. I recommend that you donate to the creator of any font you find useful.

Let's start the project
I am going to use Flash Develop...[more]

lash Inter-Web Mash-Up Feb 15, 2010: The Mail bag.

I have received an interesting array of emails over the last 2 weeks, some good, some bad, some CGA with speaker sound... (all of these are the good ones).

Ace's Retro Picks:
First let's take a look at some New Grounds retro style games that "our man on the street", Ace "The Super Villian" has found.

THE BEST FLASH GAME EVER (According to Ace).
Level Up! It's a platformer where you have a number of skills such as jump, run, healing, knowledge, relationship, etc. that you can level up as you use them. At first it's just fun little gem gathering and chatting with the amnesiac hero guy, but a more sinister vibe becomes apparent as you go along. It's made by Titch using the Flixel Engine and has a very nice pixely graphical style and Cave Story -esque gameplay. I'd recommend setting aside an hour or so for this game, though you can save and come back.
Jeff's take: This is a sweet sweet game. I will be playing it for a while!

One Button Bob: This is a lot like Wario Ware if you've done that, but the visuals remind me of Pitfall a bit. You click the mouse to do various tasks. I thought it would be like press Space to Win, but it's much more skill oriented than that one.
Jeff's Take: A very clever retro styled game where the left mouse button performs a single different action on each screen.[more]...