Let players design their own levels with BonusLevel

Today I am going to introduce you a service that will allow players to design their own levels of your game.

I am talking about BonusLevel

The concept of the site it to provide an API that allows players create and share their own levels.

This may be helpful when you are great at programming but don’t have level design skills, or want to release a level pack every month or two (who said “like Bloons”?).

Once there are enough great levels created by the community, you can export the levels and make a standalone version of your game that you can distribute wherever you want (who said “like Bloons” again?).

BonusLevel API provides some interesting features allowing you to group your levels in categories, or make them playable only after beating another level (the famous unlocking system). Read more

Game prototype involving shape drawing and a ball

Sometimes I play and mess with code to get some interesting game prototypes.

Although I am not satisfied about this one, I want to share it with you anyway.

You have to draw a lasso with the mouse trying to catch the ball inside the shape you will create. In this case you’ll win.

If the ball touches the line before you close the shape, you die.

Uncommented code because it’s just an early stage, but if you are interested I will try to turn it into something playable. Read more

Create a Flash Game like Nano War - step 2

In the 1st step we created the units and the engine to select them.

Now it’s time to write the code to let selected unit(s) send troops to other unit.

I created a new frame for the sphere object, a green circle, representing the target unit.

Let’s make a recap:

Frame 1: black circle, unselected unit

Frame 2: red circle, selected unit

Frame 3: green circle, target unit

Obviously, an unit cannot be target of itself

So, once we have one or more selected units, the script will have to:

If the player does not press the mouse

Draw a line from selected unit(s) to current mouse position

If the mouse is not over an unselected unit, leave all unselected units to frame 1

If the mouse is over an unselected unit, play frame 3 for that unit and leave all unselected units to frame 1

If the player presses the mouse

If the mouse is clicked outside an unselected unit, deselect all selected units

If the mose is clicked inside a unselected unit, deselect all selected units and select the new unit (during next part we’ll see how to move troops to this unit)

Here it is the script: Read more

Create a Flash Game like Nano War

Some days ago I played a bit Nano War.

It’s an interesting RTS, and pretty easy to delvelop.

In this part we’ll analyze the unit selection system.

In Nano War your units are circles, and this helps a lot because it’s very easy to determine collisions knowing radius and center.

Anyway, you can select units in these ways:

Click on an unselected unit: you select the unit

Click on an selected unit: you keep selecting the unit (good!)

Click outside an unit: you deselect all units

Click outside an unit and drag mouse: you select all units whose center is inside the shape you are drawing bby dragging the mouse. Read more

Showing MochiAds leaderboards in any Flash movie or web page

Ok, so you created your awesome game, embedded MochiAds leaderboards and want to publish high scores in your homepage, in another Flash movie, or wherever you want, just outside the game.

Just think about Kongregate, that shows top scores on the right of the game you are playing.

That’s what we are going to do.

Information stored into MochiAds leaderboards

Every player who enters the leaderboard is saved with its name, the score (obviously), the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 Country code and the timestamp of his score.

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes are two-letter country codes in the ISO 3166-1 standard to represent countries and dependent territories.

They are published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as part of its ISO 3166 standard.

Read this page for further information.

The timestamp is the number of millisecond passed from January 1st, 1970

There are other information you can get from MochiAds leaderboards such as the number of entries for each leaderboard, but in this example I am only showing an all-time top 10 chart, so I already have enough information.

Refer to MochiAds Developer Support for the full list of options. Read more

Create 3D avatars and win over $20,000 with Meez and FlashGameLicense

Let me introduce you an interesting opportunity to improve the look and feel of your games and win cash prizes: MeezInside Avatar Games Contest hosted by Meez and FlashGameLicense.

You should already know FGL for its marketplace and First Impressions services.

Meez is a social entertainment site where can create animated 3D avatars, dress up the avatars, play free games and use the avatars in virtual worlds.

You can also use created avatars as an AIM emoticon or export it into MySpace, Facebook and other sites.

I am trying the service and I have to admit the avatars you can create are very detailed.

There are lots of backgrounds, settings and assets that the only limit seems to be your creativity… and your Coinz, since some features cost Coinz, Meez’s virtual money.

This is an avatar I created almost for free, and that will be used in a game I am developing

Now, let’s talk about money…

FlashGameLicense and Meez are offering Flash games developers over $20,000 in prizes for the best games using the MeezInside Avatar API.

Oh, yes, they released an API!

Your entry is also eligible for primary licenses, ad revenue, and the other licensing options you expect from FGL!

Refer to the official page for full guidelines and let me introduce you the API.

As said in the API docs, the Meez Inside Games API offers a turnkey solution for users to bring their own custom characters effortlessly into Flash games deployed anywhere on the web. The Meez Inside Games Platform also allows developers to easily and quickly generate custom NPCs to embed in their projects, while selecting from a broad range of gameready animations.

Once you created an avatar, like mine, go to Meez Image Service and with a couple of clicks in a simple interface like this one

You will be able to generate a filmstrip with an animation such as all walking directions for a game like I did, or gestures such as laughing, waving and so on.

Also, I would like you to look at the detail of every single frame.

Now, even if you are not interested in taking part at the contest, you’ll have a beautiful animation to be used in your next game… add to it the chance to win up to $10,000 (the first prize) and you’ll definitively want to know something more about Meez.

Again, start from the MeezInside Contest Detail page and good luck!

Create a Flash game like Deflection - part 3

Multipart tutorial: available parts 1, 2, 3

In this 3rd part we are going to create a complete game with exit and two levels.

Read parts 1 and 2 if you haven’t done it already.

I’ll also fix a bug reported by Questo:

I was playing around and if you right click while making a line it sotps the ball but the ball keeps moving when you put lines on it. it’s pretty cool.

It’s not a difficult task since the game engine is already working… I just created a makelevel function that handles level creation with a switch Read more

RRODE: the second one-week game

My 10th released game is my 9th produced one.

If you wonder why Summer Couples was made a month after the game I am going to introduce now, it’s because looking for a sponsorship can take some time.

More than a month in this case.

Once I uploaded the game on FlashGameLicense I received some offers in the first week but I had to wait a month in order to get the one I think it’s the best for that kind of game.

So think twice before accepting the first offer

First of all let me introduce the sponsor: HALLPASS.

It’s one of the big names out there, so it does not need any additional information, but just let me remind you what Hallpass has and other sites do not have: challenges Read more

50 ways to make us HATE your Flash game

I know a spanish proverb saying “La mejor verdad se dice jugando” that sounds like “Tell the shocking truth when you’re kidding”.

That’s what Mr. Sun at the Helion Code said about 50 Ways to Make us HATE your Flash Game.

He is telling the shocking truth in a friendly way… but these are 50 mistakes you really must avoid.

Let’s see the first ten:

1. Add loud and annoying sound effects to your game
2. Don’t add a mute buttons so we have to listen to your loud and annoying sound effects
3. Make your game ridiculously hard
4. Don’t put in a preloader
5. Have a confusing menu system
6. Forget to embed all of your dynamic textfields
7. Make a game from a tutorial and submit it without making any kinds of changes
8. Have sloppy art
9. Add Mochiads everywhere (unless you need to load external stuff everywhere)
10. Don’t optimize your code

The most interesting thing is I said “done!” at every step…

Well, now you have 40 more reasons to read the original post.

Made me smile… and think…

Create a Flash game like Totem Destroyer

An interesting game released these days is Totem Destroyer

Your mission is to destroy the totems without letting the golden Idol (aka Tot) fall into the ground.

It’s a game that can be easily done with the AS3 physics engine Box2DFlashAS3, recently updated at version 2.0.1

I already talked about it in the post Playing with Box2DFlashAS3, now it’s time to make something more serious.

To make this prototype, I just changed some values in the demo script provided with the package and I made the beginning of a cute game in a few minutes.

Since it’s not a final game, I just created a level, made the ground indestructible and the other bodies destructible by pressing the mouse on them. Read more

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