Rick Triqui: my first PlayCrafter game

You should remember my post Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter.

Well, I made my first game with this tool, and I want to share with you my opinions about the editor.

First of all, play Rick Triqui and rate with 5/5 :)

Then, read my comments

The idea

After playing some PlayCrafter games I found most developers modders used it like a sandbox, putting in every asset the editor offers.

So most games suffer the problem they are filled with everything kind of asset, and the final result is bad, it’s like adding all effects to a Photoshop layer. The result won’t look good.

So I designed Rick Triqui as a Rick Dangerous tribute, at that time level design was so interesting that some spikes and a couple of ladders could challenge an expert player for hours.

So this is my first advice: dont’ fill a level with every asset, in my game I only used solid blocks, destroyable block, spiked balls and plasma cannons. The less items you use, the more you must focus on level design.

Making the game

Making the game itself was like playing a game. I moved any kind of object, adjusting its position, cutting, pasting, and so on. The editor is very powerful, you’ll enjoy making your game

Downloading the game

Let me warn you: if you want to make some bucks out of your game, you must download it and upload on revenue sharing sites such as Kongregate or on a web page with ads in it. In order to do it, you need a premium account.

Using PlayCrafter without a premium account means just using it like a sandbox. Now, the first bad new… due to the large amount of silly games, in order to download a game even if you have a premium account, you’ll need at least 25 plays and 3 likes.

There isn’t a large amount of people in the portal (I counted 28 to 32 people in the chat) so it took me a couple of hours to get such visits, and I had to beg for plays in the chat (shame on me).

Then, once you can freely download your game, you’ll notice you can’t get the game in real time… you’ll have to wait for PlayCrafter to send it to your email

I got my game in a couple of hours but I think this may change according to your timezone and the time you upload the game.

Uploading the game

Finally I was ready to upload the game, and I have to say PlayCrafter guys did a great job embedding Kongregate API’s and clear instructions about their configuration in the portal.

On request, they can add a MochiAds to your game and you’ll get 10% of the revenue, and if you want to use your game for commercial purposes (to advertise a commercial product, etc.) then it’s $100 / game.

Final considerations

Try to create a decent game because like it or not all PlayCrafter’s games look very similar, and I saw some comments on PlayCrafter games saying “stolen” or “stop publishing crappy PC games” and so on.

Last but not least, even if I have a premium account there are two features I’d be willing to pay for:

* Adding external links to game assets – with about a 10% clickthrough it would be interesting

* Using my own MochiAds. With 10% of the revenue (that means 5% of Mochi’s income), it’s quite senseless wasting time uploading the game anywhere

That’s it… now give me some feedback about Rick Triqui.

** edit **

I’ve just received an update from Mathilde Pignol from PlayCrafter

If you would like to use your own MochiAd, that’s no problem. Please PayPal the $100 to cm[at]playcrafter.com and send me the MochiAd ID that you want to use. I will compile it in to your game and send you a new link.

Prototype of a Flash game like Meeblings

You should all known Meeblings and the sequel, Meeblings 2.

You have to help the Meeblings (cute creatures I’d love to burn alive) reaching the exit using some special abilities.

One of such abilities attracts Meeblings when you click and hold the mouse on a special Meebling.

In the prototype you are about to see, derived from the basic HelloWorld Box2D example, there are 10 randomly placed balls with different masses.

When you click and hold anywhere on the stage, every ball in a 4 meters radius (read this post and this post too if you don’t know how to convert meters to pixels) will be attracted towards the mouse pointer.

The more the distance, the stronger the attraction. Read more

How to embed a text file in Flash

Reading some comments about the “Word Play” Flash Game Contest on this blog and on some forum threads, I noticed people can’t import a big list of words into Flash.

So here I am with a complete example :)

First, put your txt file in the same folder of your Flash project.

Then, the main file can be something like this one:

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package {
	import flash.display.Sprite;
	import flash.text.TextField;
	public class wordz extends Sprite {
		var text_field:TextField = new TextField();
		var words:embedded_text = new embedded_text();
		public function wordz() {
			addChild(text_field);
			text_field.height=400;
			text_field.width=500;
			text_field.text=words.toString();
		}
	}
}

Really nothing new except the words variable at line 6 that belongs to a class called embedded_text, that is the key class of this example.

Let me show it:

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package {
	import flash.utils.ByteArray;
	[Embed(source="words.txt",mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
	public class embedded_text extends ByteArray {
		public function embedded_text() {
		}
	}
}

What? That easy?

Yes… the magic is at line 3 where I specify the path and the mime type of the file to embed. And I’ll have it ready to use into my Flash project

I can’t show you the final result because displaying thousands of words would crash the browser, but if you download the example, you can click on it and scroll the mousewheel to see all words I am using in the game I am developing to enter the contest.

Download the source code and enjoy.

Create a Flash game in minutes with PlayCrafter

Today I am going to talk about a revolutionary way to make quality Flash games: PlayCrafter.

I must admit I am overhelmed by the enormous amount of options of this tool, but I’ll try to be as much clean as I can in my review.

Tired of making online games? Make a game online

First, PlayCrafter is an online tool. You don’t need to install any software in your computer. And this is the first great feature, because this means you don’t even need a computer to make a Flash game, you can just sit in an internet cafè and make your game in a matter of minutes.

The power of drag & drop

In PlayCrafter, you don’t need to write a single line of code. You just drag and drop elements to the stage, designing your level in a few clicks.

Any element has its own features, so a turret will automatically fire, a car will skid, a space trooper will jump and fire bouncing bombs, and so on.

The engine that handle physics is the famous Box2D so expect accurate physics simulation.

New elements are added frequently so you’ll never run out of ideas.

You can even edit your element or import your own graphics.

The Community

There is a quite big community behind PlayCrafter. You can play, rate and even edit games made by other players.

When you game receives a good feedback from the community, you can export your Flash game and publish it on game portals

The price

PlayCrafter is free to use, but you can pay a monthly fee ($4.95) to upgrade your account to “Premium” and unlock exclusive features such as raising the limit of levels to 100 and exporting the games to Flash portals.

Moreover, some assets in the game cost an a mount of Pips, the PlayCrafter’s currency. You can buy Pips with real money or you can have for free if your refer users.

The limits

At the moment, the most important limits are the fixed stage size and the lack of scrolling. In my opinion, if PlayCrafter guys do not add more and more assets this will cause a large number of games with no difference among them.

Monetization

I am going to test the monetization of this tool very soon, meanwhile play Matcheroo to see a nice game made with this tool.

Final considerations

I strongly suggest to try PlayCrafter even if you are an experienced developer… you know… at school or at work you can’t install Flash… so why don’t you make a game between a task and another?

Expect a game made with this tool very soon…

Upgrade your Flash CS4 to 10.0.2

I was playing with some thousands of words in an array to enter the “Word Play” Flash Game Contest when I got this strange error:

Obviously there was nothing wrong in my line 1, but it’s a CS4 issue related to compiling large projects.

So I recommend you to check for the Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Update (10.0.2) released to fix some important issues.

This update for Flash CS4 Professional (10.0.2) addresses issues related to compiling large projects. Specifically, it addresses stability and performance issues related to large animation files, such as timeline scrubbing and looping and nested movie clips, as well as text handling.

This may be the reason you couldn’t compile the Flash file with all words in it.

With my 10.0.2 version everything is going right and I am heading for the 1st prize :)

Play Mazeroll, my latest Box2D game

After SamePhysics, I made another Box2D game called Mazeroll.

You have to drag a maze to made two circles touch, collecting as much red orbs as you can, before time reaches zero.

You can find some clues about the making of this game reading The magic of compound objects with Box2D and Perfect maze generation – tile based version.

I simply put together these two concept and added some gameplay.

As you can see there are some in-game banners, and there is room for two more banners in the rotation, so starting from June 29, when the game is supposed to have been widely published, I will insert two (and only two) more ** LIFETIME ** banners for as low as $100 per banner.

Drop me an email at info[at]emanueleferonato.com if you want to be one of the lucky two people that will get these banners.

Win up to $7000 with “Word Play” Flash Game Contest

Dictionary.com and MochiAds are bringing you a completely new contest for summer 2009 with $15,000 in prizes.

Beside the cash, this is a very interesting contest because you must use words, and this will require a lot of game design skill to procude something different than Scrabble.

Another interesting thing is Dictionary.com is even providing a word list to help you get started! The only rules for using this list is to mark on the Title Screen of your game that it is being powered by “dictionary.com”.

You can download the list at this link, and in the zipped file you will find a .eps file with the logo and a list of 147,306 (!!) words.

I will made a couple of tutorials about the use of these words during next days, meanwhile let me talk about the prizes:

1st Place – $7,000
2nd Place – $4,000
3rd Place – $2,000
Honorable Mention (x2) – $1,000 each

Start Date: June 9th, 2009

End Date: August 14th, 2009

Contest Criteria:

* Must incorporate the MochiAds Version Control and Encryption service
* Must be distribution-enabled and use MochiAds Leaderboards
* Must run MochiAds advertisements
* Must be a word game or a game themed around words and puzzles
* Must be entered in MochiAds before midnight August 14th, 2009 PST
* Must be tagged with “dictionary.com”

Check the official page for all information.

Papervision3D: understanding Plane object – part 6

In part 5 we created a playing card.

Now it’s time to make it a bit more realistic. You know when you play again and again with playing cards, they bend.

We’ll learn how to bend our planes.

To bend objects in Papervision3D we need a 3rd party library called AS3Dmod.

AS3Dmod is a framework for creating static and animated modifier stacks, so you can modify the same object with more than one modifier.

So the steps to add a modifier to an object are:

1) Create a modifier stack and apply it to the object

2) Add a modifier to the stack

3) Configure the modifier

4) Repeat from step 2 if you want to add more than one modifier

5) Apply the queue

Now it’s time to download the library from the official Google Code page and copy the com folder in the same path you copied the org Papervision3D folder. Don’t worry if you can’t find it, at the end of the page I included the full source code with all needed libraries in the proper positions.

Now, the script we already saw at part 5 with the new lines commented.

Plese notice at lines 42 and 43 I added more segments to the planes, to have a smoother blend.

To understand what segments represent, read part 1 Read more

Papervision3D: understanding Plane object – part 5

This is the time to add textures to our plane from a movieclip.

Since I am making a card game, I want to store all cards in a single movieclip and assign each frame to a different plane.

At the moment I have only two frames, one with the front and one with the back of the card, because the creation of the “perfect card” is not over yet…

I am attaching the commented code, and please notice I NEVER add the card clip on the stage using addChild

All the uncommented code has been explained from part 1 to 4 Read more

Papervision3D: understanding Plane object – part 4

Understanding planes has never been so much fun, so here we go with the 4th part.

This is full of new features, such as:

* Making interactive objects

* Giving objects a name

* Changing object colors on the fly

This is the same old script as seen in Papervision3D: understanding Plane object – part 3 and previous tutorials, with some modifications. Read more

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