Creation of a Flash Stabilize! clone using Box2D – part 2

Time to add some new features to our Stabilize! clone we started in this post.

The features we’ll add this time are:

* Restricted area in which you can drop crates
* “Real” crates, made with a movieclip, take the place of the boxes you can draw with the mouse

As you can see, the script looks less and less like the original Drawing boxes on the fly in Box2D and it’s starting to become a custom one.

To create the restricted area, I simply create the area movieclip and check if the mouse in inside such movieclip with hitTestPoint method.

It works with three parameters:

x:Number – The x coordinate to test against this object.

y:Number -The y coordinate to test against this object. These coordinates are mouseX and mouseY

shapeFlag:Boolean (default = false) -Whether to check against the actual pixels of the object (true) or the bounding box (false). Obviously I want it to be true

Here it is the source code: Read more

Horror Profile: Facebook application

You are all invited to try Horror Profile, a Facebook application I made in about an hour.

The application takes your name and profile photo, and combines them in a creepy environment to create an horrific photo that you can upload to your album.

During next days I’ll release the full tutorial to create an application with ads, photo uploads, dynamic text generation, and all the features you see in the application.

Meanwhile, Play with it.

Creation of a Flash Stabilize! clone using Box2D – part 1

In Triqui’s picks 1 I told you Stabilize! is a good game to clone using Box2D.

And I would use this post to focus on another thing too… it’s about recycling.

I mean… once you code for a while, or follow developer’s blogs like this one providing a lot of source codes, probably most of the stuff you need has already been written here and there.

In this case, the script we are going to modify is Drawing boxes on the fly in Box2D.

You will see we can make the whole game simply changing the original script step by step.

Coding this way will speed up your learning curve because you are starting from a working project so you don’t have to worry about the overall environment, and you can focus on small changes.

In this first step, we’ll just spend a couple of words about the balance bar.

It’s made up with a static object (the fulcrum) and a dynamic one (the bar).

In order to work, the density of the bar should be quite greater than the one of the falling boxes, or you’ll risk to lose the bar once the first box falls on it. Read more

Triqui’s picks #2

Let’s see the games I featured on triqui.com this week:

Zombie Taxi 2: Half Grand Theft Auto (the fist release), half Carmageddon, you have to rescue the people in the city before they become infected.

What I liked: the overall experience

Programming difficulty: Making a really clean and complete game is never easy. 4/5

Globulous Challenge: single player version of Globulos game, features 25 levels you have to complete in just one turn

What I liked: great strategy game

Programming difficulty: besides the level design, it’s a quite easy physics game without gravity 2/5 Read more

About season games

Season games are games based upon Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and so on.

Normally they are classic games with a season theme, just like my two ones, Christmas Couples and Halloween Couples.

The question is: is it worth it to work on season games?

If you read this post, you can read it’s not worth it.

I just want to focus on two things:

1) As said, sesason games are just themed games… so it’s easy to turn a classic game into a season one or a season one into a classic one, by just skinning it a bit

2) The world isn’t over, so I am expecting another Christmas next year.

Finally, I would like to share these charts, to demonstrate how season games live a second (or even third!!) life when the season is back again. Read more

In-game banners, after 1,000,000 plays

Some time ago I released SamePhysics, my first Box2D game, a self-sponsored game with a rotating banner placed in the lower play area.

I decided to rotate five different banners, four of them link to my sites/games and one was sold to Rotten Tomato Games.

I published some considerations after 75,000 views

Let’s see what happened after 1,000,476 views

1: Banner to Paypal asking for a donation: 16081 clicks

2: Banner to Red Flowers: 18004 clicks

3: Banner to this blog: 15991 clicks

4: Banner to triqui.com: 15677 clicks

5: Banner to Rotten Tomato Games: did not track the clicks, but we suppose they can be about 16K as there isn’t a great click-through difference among banners.

So the total amount of clicks is 81753, that’s 8.17%.

It’s not easy to give a value to 80K clicks, I can only say 0.81% of Paypal clicks made an average donation of $0.93, and I don’t think any player got fidelized to triqui.

Probably some of them played a bit to Red Flowers and some of them still read this blog.

Anyway, let’s suppose the worst scenario, with all people visiting such sites only once.

At a $1.51 eCPM, triqui scored $27.18, the blog ($3.22 eCPM including sponsors) $51.49 and Red Flowers ($0.17 eCPM) $3.06 while donations raised $135.62 (once converted some euros to dollars)

So the minimum banner earning is $217.35 (about $0.22 eCPM), but we know in some ways (like this blog) every loyal reader is priceless.

I would like to know your considerations about in-game banners.

Alexa rank under 30K!!!

Another important milestone… the blog is climbing Alexa’s ranking ladder… some months ago it was one of the 40,000 most visited sites in the world, now it’s time to celebrate my ranking under 30K!!!

That’s a really important achievement for such a niche blog.

Thank you!!

Triqui’s Picks #1

Starting from this week, I’ll show you the new games I publish on triqui.com. I always try to pick games with interesting gameplay and in this post I’ll spend a couple of words from a PROgrammer point of view.

Stabilize!: this is the kind of Flash game I love: clean design, easy to play, no tutorials. Made probably with Box2D, it’s an interesting “don’t make stuff fall out of the screen” game.

What I liked: the concept

Programming difficulty: really easy, using Box2D… expecting a prototype soon. 1/5

Mummy Tombs: good BoxHead clone in an ancient Egypt background, with all needed features such as various enemy types, weapon shop with upgrades, and so on

What I liked: the background and the overall look… reminded me to mid 90’s arcade machines

Programming difficulty: scrolling, artificial intelligence, swapping depths, a lot of objects on stage… 4/5 Read more

WorDrop

Word Play contest is over, you can see the winners in the official MochiLand post, and it’s time to show you my little game based on words.

It’s called WorDrop and it’s a Box2D game made in a couple of days based on this prototype.

It’s not that great game but I would like to localize it in italian and spanish and see how does it perform.

Obviously big kudos to winners and expect some prototype based on winning games durin next days.

Keep your WordPress Blog (or any site) clean with new Google Webmaster Tools

Yesterday I blogged about 10 ways to secure your WordPress blog

Today I found a new, important tool to keep your blog (or site) clean: Google Webmaster Tools and its new services “Fetch as Googlebot” and “Malware details”.

Once you enter into Webmaster Tools you will find on the left Dashboard sidebar a Labs item with two sub-items: “Fetch as Googlebot” and “Malware details”.

“Fetch as Googlebot” answer the common question “What does Googlebot see when it accesses my page?” Read more

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