Triqui’s Picks #7

This week I only found 3 games I really enjoyed… maybe the best aones re yet to come since this is the last week to enter the 60 seconds to fame contest, anyway these are the games I liked:

Click Maze 2 HS: You may think a maze game is really out to date in late 2009, but I enjoyed this one, although there are only 10 levels…

What I liked: 5 minutes of fun

Programming difficulty: Hit test… 1/5

Droppy: Not my favorite kind of games, but this one is very polished and has some interesting puzzles to solve.

What I liked: The graphic and some puzzles

Programming difficulty: As usual, every level can be a standalone game… 4/5 Read more

Flash Game Developers LinkedIn group and Come2Play Flash game competition

I received a shout from Barry White (do you remember GameJacket?) about an interesting tournament made by Flash Game Developers LinkedIn group and Come2Play with $8,000 in prizes.

Original press release:

« Come2Play has teamed up with the LinkedIn Flash Game Developers group to bring you an awesome Flash Game Competition! Just integrate their API in your game, submit it and you could win one of the following cash prizes:

1st Place: $5,000
2nd Place: $2,000
3rd Place: $1,000

It’s not a massive group, so everybody here has a good chance – this is a competition with no strings attached! The game does NOT have to be new, exclusive, advert free or free of sponsor links to be entered.

The main requirement is that all submissions must have the Come2Play API implemented.

Extra benefits of implementing the API include revenue sharing, game distribution to Come2Play partners and multiplayer features.

The deadline is January 31st, 2010, so there is plenty of time to implement the API to all of your games and submit them to Come2Play! »

More information at the official page.

Expect a tutorial about Come2Play features soon.

Creation of a Flash Stabilize! clone using Box2D – part 5

Welcome to the 5th part.

Today we’ll add some gameplay… in part 4 we managed collisions, now it’s time to add a one-minute timer (yes, this is a concept for the 60 seconds to fame contest).

I think, having colored stuff on the stage, making a “match 3 to remove” game would be too obvious… so the concept is this one: make a crate collide (collide! not stay in touch!) with three other crates of the same color to make it disappear.

The one I am showing you right now is just a prototype, but I am about to finish the complete game and it can lead to interesting gameplay variations, where bouncing is preferred to stacking.

Then, a simple timer made using the concepts seen at Understanding AS3 Timer Class and Drawing arcs with AS3 is placed in the center of the stage.

This is the main file: Read more

Chronotron Flash game prototype

Do you remember Chronotron?

It’s a puzzle platform which wants you to interact with past versions of yourself to solve levels. It’s a very original game, higly recommended

Luis Fernando Silva, author of a Box2D platform engine alternative published on the blog some time ago, created a prototype of this game

« I really liked how this prototype turned out and I hope it might help someone out. Maybe a more creative coder might even improve it!

Anyways, for the past few days, I’ve been wondering how to achieve the cool time-warped NPC that repeats all you did on a past run of a level, like on Chronotron and Mouse 10*, I was shooting some thoughts on FGL chat and the idea of using arrays to store player input in an Array and make the NPC replay it came to mind. I started discussing the idea and it gained shape as I and the chat folks talked about the possibilities.

I decided I already had a good base to start coding on, and I promotly started scripting down in Flash. At the beggining, it was hard to code this, there was some issues with the way the input was ordered on the replay array, so I had to create a function to place it in the correct order, along with an issue the way the NPC interpreted it. But after many issues, troubles, crashes and bug testing, the thing is here! And it works (almost) flawlessly! »

The main file is on the timeline and it’s fully commented: Read more

Creation of a Flash Stabilize! clone using Box2D – part 4

Here I am with the 4th part of this prototype. In part 3 we saw the “next” feature, this time we’ll trigger the collision among crates of the same color.

This will allow you to create the classic “match stuff of the same color to remove it from the game” or maybe something more creative.

In this example every crate has a counter, and every time a crate hits another crate of the same color, counters of both crates increase by one.

I already showed you how Box2D manages collisions but I made it directly editing the built in b2ContactListener.as class.

It’s not the best practice as I needed to modify the original library.

The right practice is writing your own class extending b2ContactListener, then overriding the functions you need.

Let’s look at the main class: Read more

Triqui’s Picks #6

Six great games for you to play this week:

Valiance: The best game this week in my opinion… a platform game with jump, double jump, swords and gravity switch… and upgrades…

What I liked: Great game!

Programming difficulty: So many things… 5/5

Cannon Plunder: A Bloons clone, but this time you are using a cannon mounted on a pirate ship to collect coins. Some bouncers and special items give the game a new twist. You can even create and share your own levels

What I liked: It’s the kind of game you want to play just to see the next level

Programming difficulty: Bloons games aren’t that hard to make 2/5 Read more

Marketing influences game revenue three times more than high scores

Research by EEDAR has shown that a high marketing spend increases gross revenue three times more than high review scores.

The perception that high scores are crucial to sales is a myth, said EEDAR’s Jesse Divnich speaking at the Montreal International Games Summit, and developers should realise the cold fact that a poor quality game shipped with a big marketing spend will sell much better than a great game with little financial support behind it.

You can make the greatest game and it won’t even matter. I know that’s discouraging to developers at first but it’s very true.

Looking at all games released between 2007 and the end of 2008, and comparing as many different configurations as possible – single format exclusives, handheld releases, Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii only – the research came to the same conclusion; marketing is more important than game quality.

You can read the entire speech at gamesindustry.biz but what I would like to know is: do this apply to Flash games too?

First, let me say “marketing” is something different than just sending some emails to portal owners or submitting the game everywhere… it means using cash to make people know about your game.

I’ll talk later about cash, now I’ll focus on submitting the game everywhere… all in all submission takes time, so you are going to spend time to submit your game or to pay cash to someone willing to spend his time to submit your game everywhere. Read more

HiRoads case study: building a community around a game

With the so-called “Web 2.0″ and the “social network era”, just making a game and publishing it on various portals couldn’t be enough.

Some days ago we saw how Bomb Digger allows to play extra levels on its official site, now it’s time to introduce you a more complete project.

Do you remember HiRoads developer Diary?

Now the project is finished and Filippo Bodei is explaining us something about his work:

You can play the game on HiRoads’ official site.

« I published a demo version (something more than just a demo… 18 out of 27 levels) on Kongregate (rated 2.83) and NewGrounds (rated 3.70) with several ads inviting to play it on the official site where you can play more levels, create your own tracks with the level editor and play tracks submitted by users. Read more

Creation of a Flash Facebook application using AMFPHP

Some days ago I showed you how to create a Flash Facebook application using the AS3 API.

Now Yarden Refaeli from Rigel Games is sharing with us his experience in creating a Flash Facebook application using another technique.

Let’s read it:

« Hello, my name is Yarden Refaeli and I have been flash programmer for 1 year. A few weeks ago, I decided to make my first facebook flash game, Snaker. Well, I won’t lie: It was HARD. After I made it to the end, I decided to write a tutorial about the best approach to build flash-facebook game. So let’s start!

First, we need to save our meta user-data about every user in OUR database, and for this we need to use a server-side language (in this tutorial I will talk about Mysql, but every other database or server-side language is fine).

Let’s say we want to make a game that save our score at the end, and then show us the score we got, and the scores of our friends. We need to save the score for every user, with it’s unique id, which can easily access through facebook APIs. Now lets say we want to do all the server-side jobs, with PHP and not flash: we don’t want to get the user-data we need from facebook-flash API, then send it all the way to the server and store it in the database, we want ALL the facebook/database related work, done on the server-side, with PHP. You should know, that you can access simple facebook library PHP code from flash, you need to authenticate first with the facebook function “set_user” with your user’s uid, and session key, that passed via the FBML tag in the flash vars. (for some strange reason, there is NO official documentation for this function AT ALL) Read more

Triqui’s Picks #5

This was a great week for Flash gamers, here it is a list of really really great games.

The best picks so far, in my opinion. You’ll really enjoy these ones.

B.C. Bow Contest: Great bow game with a prehistoric theme… win all tournaments using several kinds of arrows

What I liked: Everything, great Nitrome game, as usual

Programming difficulty: The hardest part is the physics behind arrows… 3/5

Cannon Bods 2009: Kill parachuting pirates with your Bod, using one or more cannons

What I liked: it’s a funny game…

Programming difficulty: I think there is a glitch if you shoot too close to a pirate, your Bod won’t hit him… :( 1/5 Read more

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