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I have no idea how to use this yet but man that is some nice flash!

Building Great Games With Flash

This was an interesting session in that the demands for innovative are presented as being very high and the power of Flash being able to deliver is also very high. I know that sounds like a schmaltzy pro-adobe marketing milkshake but it just seems like Adobe is really the place to make fun stuff happen when it comes to casual gaming. Two really great notes to take away from this session is the need to rapidly prototype idea’s before going crazy with the implementation AND that the best games are made great by the amazing amount of polish they receive. Couldn’t agree more on that last point…

Oh quick note – fast forward to the 15 minute mark or you’ll be listening to 8-bit music mixed with background noise…

Flash Platform Gaming Showcase

This session had a fair amount of interesting stuff in it – namely – that gaming is now being seen as one of the top 3 use cases for Flash. Apparently before it was video and something to do with cupcakes but now…NOW…it’s gaming! It was cool to hear that adobe actually has an arcade team and are looking to post some game-related content to the ADC in the next few weeks. Other cool tidbits – Pixel Bender apparently has some cool stuff on the horizon that doesn’t involve just manipulating images and Three Melons has a game development tool? Very interesting…

Building Browser-Based MMO’s

This was an engaging session on the business-side of building MMO’s and was really interesting to get an insight to what kind of topics need to be considered when taking on something like an MMO…Here are the standout notes on this one:

• “…Casual gamers play just as long as hardcore games but they need to think they can stop at any moment…”
• Figure out what you can automate early and do it.
• You’re app is just going to break, you can’t plan for it. Build,Test,Fix.
• The whole concept of cliffs and the funnel.

So now I’m a little brain-fried but definitely got some useful information from tonight’s session. I’m done with the Max-at-Home gaming track so I’ll probably finish up tomorrow with some of the dev sessions. It’s still a little hard to watch videos for any length of time on the internet – maybe it’s just me but it’s just too darn easy to hop over to another site the second there is a lull in the session. It’s worth it though – but it does bring home the true value in paying for the conference and seeing these folks live.

Ok, after a proofreading of this post it looks like I’m an adobe squawk box in some area’s…I’ll buy that but I really just don’t see any other technology really able to deliver like flash is right now (yes, I’m looking at you silverlight, don’t turn away from me!)

First up – “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know” by Grant Skinner. This was a great session – I was totally interested from start to finish and there were definitely more than a few gems to grab onto here. From new ways to think about OOP and the pragmatic declaration to “love the timeline” -(when was the last time you heard that advice?)- I found a lot to takeaway. One thing I didn’t think about was using custom tweens on simpler things and eschewing using a tweening engine (despite that fact that his company wrote one) for every single animation (like I’ve been doing ever since I found out you could abstract that chore to a separate library.) Grant has all of his talks located on one page and they’re kinda interesting to look at, highly recommended.

All in all, a very illuminating way to spend an hour – here is the video followed by my favorite slides:

If you want to see some really well done Augmented Reality (AR) go here – plus – John Mayer explaining AR is probably more interesting than me…

So I’ve seen some AR in the browser for a little while now and have wanted to play around with the FLAR Toolkit for some time but like most things…I just hadn’t gotten around to it. So I finally got some nerve to hop in tonight and thanks to the FLARManager I was able to get stuff going pretty darn quick. I LOVE this community! Right away I was able to get the proverbial earth and moon example going but have a couple of other idea’s I’d love to try out.

Want to see it for yourself? Well, print out the card you find here, make sure you have a webcam hooked up, and then go to here. Flash will ask for your permission to use your webcam and once you do – BLAMMO – hold up your freshly minted card to your camera and start seeing the AR experience for yourself! It’s better than unicorn tears or flowers that taste like cake!

You should be seeing something very much like this…

I’m going to try and do something more interesting but we’ll see how far it goes. It’s incredibly fun to play with…I wonder if I could make a game out of it? Hmmmm……

But something changed. I don’t know if it was me, I’m not sure if was the tooling or if anyone else even feels this way but…I lost something when I started using flex. I lost something and I want it back.

I was looking through my collection of old fla’s on my hard drive…some of them are quite crude but they have something that it seems that none of my flex apps have. They’re fun. They look nicer, they’re simpler…it’s almost like I’m looking back at a time of creativity and glee. Seriously, “G-L-E-E.” I used to try and design things. I had to, I couldn’t just throw a whole bunch of controls and MovieClips on the stage and leave it as it was. I think the change is that Flex encourages you to look at your code. In the flash IDE, you tried to make the code look “nice” but really, who cared? I wasn’t building enterprise grade apps back in the day…I was building widgets, I was making cool things, I was having fun. I used to think about motion, I used to think about really doing something cool, coming up with things that people hadn’t seen before. Now I think about libraries, and class structure and frameworks. I care about memory optimization and say things like “I wish I could overload methods in actionscript, mang” when I used to say things like “I love Flash, it makes me feel like I can do anything.” I was one of those people that defended the presence of the drawing toolbar in the IDE and I got really good at using my tablet to make all kinds of crazy art with the tool.

But Flex changed that. Yes I could still use Flash and make swc’s and go to “Commands” and “Convert to Flex Component” but in reality…I dunno…it seems to make the magic feel far away. I’m realizing that the last time I made something that I actually wanted to show to people was when I created Dropping Joes which brought me back to the creative suite and closer to “designing an experience” rather than “crafting some code.”

I don’t know where I’m at with it all yet…I do know that I’m probably going to start spending more time in CS4 and less time in Flex (Flash) Builder. I’m trying to find something witty to say to end this post of whinging about Flex but I got nothin. I’m just looking forward to having fun again.

For the longest time I’ve wanted to make a flash game and just never had to time or will to actually do it, in the last week however, I finally made the time. It’s currently in that 90% done phase but for some reason it seems to take as much time to go from 90% to 95% as it did to go from 0% to 75% – I’ve been knee deep in character animation, tweaking gravity, choosing colors (not an easy task for me btw) and a whole other assortment of other less glamorous tasks. I’ve learned a couple of things from the whole process…

1. I’ve been in the Flex world way too long – I forgot how fun (and frickin convenient) it is to just put code and graphics right on the timeline and never look back. Yeah yeah the action panel in cs4 blows but using Flash and Flex together proves to be a really helpful little workflow.

2. Drawing is easy – animating is hard…and long…and tedious. It’s rewarding when it all comes together but it does take some effort to get there.

3. I had the “This is a great idea” euphoria from the 0% to 30% mark and for a few days there I thought the whole project was going to be a real stinker. I just wanted to stop and throw everything away and move on to something else with much more…well, awesomeness i guess. I kinda forced myself to stick with it though and I broke through the horrible feelings of abandonment that I was having. Amazingly, I actually like playing it now.

4. gotoAndPlay() – oh how I’ve missed you.

5. I originally planned for this thing to take one week, no more. Well, coding a project with a couple of hours late at night doesn’t lead to the fastest development cycle. This week will be more of a polishing and I’ll probably send it out to some friends for them to try it out but Thursday is my deadline. All in all this whole thing would have consumed around 20 hours – probably a little bit much for a flash game but worth it in my opinion.

I think that’s it for now, I’ll write more detailing the actual game and not just my late night ramblings – hope you like the (unfinished) screenshot!

I’ve got to admit, I have a thing for flash games. Especially types like scarygirl.com where you can tell that someone really enjoyed putting this thing together. I can’t really describe it but it certainly falls in the “what the heck were these folks smoking?” genre. I highly recommend checking it out – some really high quality art and flash work here.

This is probably the slightest of issues that you could have but, just in case anybody out there out there gets stuck, here is the simplest of solutions to the most obscure of problems:

Easing equations – if you’re using Flex you use mx.motion.easing.* or, if you’re using Flash CS4 you use fl.motion.easing.*. Everything is great right? Well, what if you create an actionscript only project in Flex Builder and want to use an easing formula? Guess what – you have access to neither my friend. If you want to use the fl package though (and you have Flash CS4 installed – if you don’t, ask one of your Flash friends to hook you up) simply go to Applications/Adobe Flash CS4/Common/Configuration/ActionScript 3.0/libs, copy the flash.swc that you find there and reference it in your project – BAM – the fl library is now yours.

*sorry for the lame title