Triqui’s Picks #16

Three really funny and amazing games this week:

Go to Hell!: Dig through 666 meters to reach hell and find out its secret. You have to dig all the way down through caves filled with water, lava, boulders and enemies. You’ll need to eat, breathe and avoid or kill monster to survive.

What I liked: Nice concept, reminded me A Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I really enjoyed it

Programming difficulty: The water… 5/5

Snipedown: A “defense” game with a World War 2 theme… you play as a sniper and must defend your base from 20 waves of enemies. Air strikes and machine guns will help you.

What I liked: Obliterating the infantry has never been so much fun…

Programming difficulty: Not that hard… all in all it’s just an hit test with some twist. 2/5 Read more

Are you ready for this?

You should know some hours ago Apple unveiled its new jewel, called iPad.

Besides the innovation and the cool features, the most interesting thing is the iPad compatibility with all existing iPhone applications and obviously the SDK to create dedicated applications, at the full 1024×768 resolution.

With the same iPhone Developer Program account you will access to the SDK, the simulator, and all the tool you need to develop iPad applications and game.

Are you ready for this? The first iPhone developers raised a lot of bucks… what’s your opinion?

Box2DFlash 2.1a released – what changed

Some days ago Boris the Brave released the new version of the popular physics library.

There are some critical changes that won’t make old projects run in the new environment.

The most important ones are:

• It is now not necessary to specify a size for your world, it’ll always be large enough.
• Improved collisions system
• You must specify if a body is dynamic, no matter if its mass is greater than zero
• Fixtures now determine material properties of shapes, such as density, friction and so on

But I think an example will be more explicative than a thousand words, so I created a simple vehicle you can control with left and right arrow keys. It uses revolute joints and motors.

This is the code you would need in the old Box2D version Read more

Get detailed statistics about your Flash game with SWFStats

Are you looking for a fresh and complete tool to track how your game is performing?

Then SWFStats may be the API you need.

SWFStats is a Flash analytics software with a lot of features, some of them absolutely unique for this kind of software. Let’s see them:

• Easy integration
• Track views, playtime
• Tracks views and plays seperately – unique
• Public reports
• Detailed source/country reports – unique
• Distibution reports – unique
• Custom metrics / events
• Level metrics
• Unlimited data

The overall look and feel is very similar to Google Analytics, but we are talking about Flash games statistics, not website reports.

SWFStats provides clean, complete, fast and professional reports, as you can see from this video:

SWFStats also provides a completely transparent leaderboard service with no branding.

It can be integrated directly into your Facebook application, can be used to show global or site-specific scores, and you can easily delete and block cheaters.

SWFStats is currently in beta and during the beta is completely free. Once it will be officially released, you will be credited with an extra game you can use, after which you will have to decide if you wish to continue using the service for new games.

At the moment there isn’t any pricing plan, but the service looks very promising and I think you shouldn’t miss a try.

Games that Challenge the World Come2Play contest – $8,000 in prizes

Do you want to make something interesting out of the Come2Play multiplayer API tutorial?

Here it is your chance to win up to $5,000!!

Come2Play – Creators of the first white-label social gaming platform and multiplayer game API – are holding a contest, in conjunction with the LinkedIn Flash Game Developers group, for the development of turn based multiplayer games with prizes totaling $8,000.

In a gaming world where new games are launched and disappear just as quickly, multiplayer games with a social infrastructure are a huge hit amongst users; developing a loyal fan base that come back daily to play against each other and their friends.

Come2Play has developed this infrastructure and are inviting game developers to take advantage of it.

Come2Play is revitalizing the formula by allowing for correspondence challenges. With correspondence challenges, a player makes the first move in a game and then sends it to all their friends through email or their favorite social network. Each individual friend can then send back their next move. Each friend who responds starts a new game with the creator of the game. This gaming form provides a huge viral opportunity to game developers looking to expand the reach of their games.

In light of this initiative, Come2Play is launching their latest contest – The Games That Challenge the World Competition. Read more

Triqui’s Picks #15

Only two games this week, and a lot of garbage jigsaw puzzles…

Hill Of Defend: Fresh defense game, with a different view. This time you’ll defend your base from a side view.

What I liked: Normally I hate classic defense games, but this one has a new and original approach.

Programming difficulty: Very complete game. 5/5

Sagoo: Platform game with interesting physics puzzles

What I liked: Cool game, cool character.

Programming difficulty: Interesting use of Box2D combined with various stuff. 5/5

See you next week

Mochi Media Haiti Relief Fund

You certainly know what happened in Haiti some days ago. On January 12, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck and almost destroyed the capital and all nearby cities.

The whole world is moving to support disaster relief, and I want you to know MochiMedia will be participating in the Haiti relief fund initiative that has started within the community already.

Now developers can share games’ earnings to help Haitian people.

If you have a MochiMedia account with active game, follow these steps:

1. Click on any game in your Developer Account
2. Go to “Game Settings”
3. Scroll to the bottom to “Revenue Sharing”
4. Enter “MochiHaitiRelief” (without quotes) as the Developer to share with
5. Choose the percentage you’d like to share for your game’s earnings
6. Revenue will be appropriately split when they’ll calculate grand totals at the end of the month for all games

Mochi will also be matching dollar to dollar for the amount shared with the MochiHaitiRelief account. That means if at the end of the month that $500 has been put in, Mochi will match the $500 as well.

More information at the official site

HiRoads case study: the aftermath

Do you remember Filippo Bodei’s HiRoads case study?

After two months with HiRoads in the wild, Filippo shares with us the result of his project.

« Here we are again after about two monts since HiRoads went live!

Today, the 21st of January, I can count 1203 registered users and 250 roads published on www.hiroads.com
What does it mean? It means an average of 20 new users and 4 new roads per day.
Also a grand total of 1050$ (Mochiads + AdSense + 2 site-locked version) was earned.
But let’s start from the beginning. Read more

Way of an Idea Box2D prototype – Step 3

Welcome to the 3rd part. In part 2 we allowed the player to draw the chalk track in a “paused” Box2D environment and then run the simulation.

Now it’s time to delete our chalk track.

A bit of theory: although the simulation is paused, the chalk bodies are already placed in the Box2D world. So we can easily select them with our old friend GetBodyAtMouse function.

Then we need to know whether the selected body is a chalk or not… we don’t want to delete other level assets or even the ball!!

So we must check if the userData of the selected body (that is the attached sprite) is a chalk. If true, we can remove the sprite from the stage and destroy the body.

This is the code: Read more

Flave, a new open source AS3 Verlet physics engine

Do you remember Luis Fernando Silva?

He released a Box2D platform engine some months ago, and now I am publishing his last work, a Verlet physics engine.

If you need more information about Verlet integration, check this post.

This is what Luis says:

« So, I was developing a small physics engine for a game of mine (Flash Physics Engine v2), and the thing started to get bigger and take shape of a real physics engine, or atleast with enough features to run a ragdoll simulation.

I’ve received feedback from some guys at FGL and so I decided it was time to release it as open source! After commenting each line of code as much as I could, after 2 weeks of bug-testing to remove some instability and after an afternoon coding some samples, I have here packed for you guys at the blog the v0.6b version!

As you can guess, it’s a verlet engine so it isn’t as stable as rigid-body engines like Box2D or Motor Engine, and the only real solid there is the particle primitive. Which is a small circle (how exciting!). But since your blog gets so many hits from all kinds of coders, I tought maybe (like with my other samples posted on your blog), some more skilled coder could improve it into something better! » Read more

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