I recently decided to give Voeveo a shot at distributing Mobile B-Out, and I have to say, I'm pretty impressed with them so far. They seem to have a very developer friendly system, and the support is stellar!
If you like to play games on your phone, then sign up at Voeveo. You will get a $7 credit to spend on any game, and I might win a new iPhone if you do!
If you haven't heard of Nonoba before, it's a relatively new gaming portal with some great features for players and developers alike.
I recently integrated their Developer API into Oroboros so that achievements and high scores could be added. Basically, you get to pick any milestones in your game, such as reaching a certain score, collecting a specific number of coins, or in my case, slicing a specific sequence of Seekers! On top of that, they allow you to upload your own icons representing the awards or badges for each achievement.
The Seeker Slicer Achievement To earn this one, you need to get the Tail of Blades, then slice at least 10 Seekers—which are the little yellow guys that follow you around and stick to your tail. They first appear on level 2, then again on levels 6 and up. Be sure to power up your Blades in the Evo Menu!
Million Point Madness Achievement This one is pretty easy. Just score a million points and it's yours!
Max Tail+30 Achievement If you can earn this award, then the million point madness challenge will be a snap. Max Tail combo multipliers add up when all of your tail segments are intact, and you successfully devour 10 energy particles. One bad move and you start back at zero, so easy does it!
That should get you 3 fancy new badges and a nice chunk of experience too. Now go and earn them! Nonoba Oroboros
My good friend Divinci—who also happens to be my neighbor, and the official Funface Games beta-tester—kicked off the Plug Awards in NYC recently. The people over at the Dell Lounge just released an awesome 7 HD cam shoot of him performing the Star Spangled Banner on 3 MPC's! It's really an amazing feat to play 3 of these things live... most people simply program a beat into it then walk away, but he tears them up Hendrix style in this video!
I would embed the video on my blog, but it's only available through the proprietary player on the Plug Awards site. To view it, follow the link below, click on "see all" then look for the clip with "Divinci" next to it. Star Spangled Banner by Divinci of SOS - 2008 Plug Awards
Ever since making the switch to AS3, like many others, I have had to re-learn several routine tasks such as making pre-loaders for my games. After hunting through the Flash CS3 docs and coming to the realization that all of the examples were focused on loading external files, I turned to the mighty Google in an attempt to shed some light on creating a self-contained loader. Most examples just parrot the help files, but after a long search, I've got something that seems to be working exactly like the good old days of sloppy AS2!
If you can get away with loading external swf files, then I have to admit, it is a much more straight forward process, but in the Flash Games Business, it is very important to have everything packaged in one tidy swf file. Many portals will not accept games with multiple files, since they may not work within their existing infrastructure. We don't want to do anything that will prevent our games from spreading virally, so a single swf is best!
First I'll toss the code out there for the folks who want to get right to it. This script goes on frame one of the main timeline, which normally contains some type of loader bar and text display to show the loader's progress.
/* "myloader" is a movieclip on the timeline that contains the loader-bar and a text field */ this.stop(); import flash.events.ProgressEvent; import flash.events.Event; import flash.display.*; loaderInfo.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, loadProgress); loaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loadComplete);
function loadProgress(e:ProgressEvent):void { var pct:Number = loaderInfo.bytesLoaded/loaderInfo.bytesTotal; myloader.l_txt.text=int(pct*100)+"%"; myloader.l_bar.width=pct*186; } function loadComplete(e:Event):void { this.gotoAndStop("menu"); }
Nice and simple, but just like a free vacation, there are a few catches. When you want to dynamically create an instance of a Sprite or MovieClip in AS3, you need to give it a linkage identifier just like in AS2. The difference now is that Flash automatically associates a class with this asset; which you can either provide or choose to not worry about, depending on what capabilities you want for that particular asset. You also have the option to export this asset in the first frame, which will cause it to load before our preloader.
In the image above, I have an asset called "Eye" which has "Export for Actionscript" checked, as well as "Export in first frame". If I wanted to create an instance of the Eye, I would just write something like this:
var myEye:Eye = new Eye(); myeEye.x=100; myEye.y=100; someMC.addChild(myEye); //etc...
...which is much nicer than the old attachMovie() from the AS2 days!
In many cases choosing "Export in first frame" is fine, but do this with enough assets, especially if they are large, and you will wind up staring at a blank screen while these assets load (before your preloader). To remedy this, I always try to un-check "Export in first frame", and never associate classes directly with my library assets from the linkage menu. Instead, I write custom classes that instantiate any Sprites or MovieClips I need; and in all reality, this allows for more flexible coding. I like to think of these as wrapper classes. For instance, say you are writing a particle engine class that needs to utilize many different Sprites. It wouldn't make sense to have the class directly associated with only one particular Sprite. It's best to think of these display objects as just a visual representation on screen, and not as the object that is containing and managing the code.
If you un-check "Export in first frame" then you will need to manually place these assets somewhere on screen, otherwise they will not be included along with your published swf file. The work around for this is the same as what we have already been doing for years. Just create a MovieClip with these assets inside it, and place it off screen. For sounds, make sure to create an extra frame that the playback head will never reach,(unless you enjoy hearing all of your sounds play simultaneously) then use the property window to add them to the timeline with start as the sync setting. See the image below for details:
So far this has worked like a charm, and I've done quite a bit of testing during the development of my new AS3 titles.
And just because we need something fun in this post, here is the source for the movie below, which demonstrates everything we've talked about. If you want to use the explosion animation in your games, then by all means, have at it. It was created in Lightwave, and I've been using it for years!
!(>_<)!
If you like to play games on your phone, then sign up at Voeveo. You will get a $7 credit to spend on any game, and I might win a new iPhone if you do!
I just saw that Oroboros got picked as the Daily Game on Nonoba today, and had to make a celebratory post about it!
The Seeker Slicer Achievement
Million Point Madness Achievement
Max Tail+30 Achievement
