Monetize your Flash games with GamesChart

Do you remember Emanuele Ornella from Mind the Move? It’s the guy behind the Come2Play multiplayer API tutorial posted about a month ago.

Now he is explaining us a new way to monetize Flash games: GamesChart

« When I first saw the announcement on Flash Game Developers group on www.linkedIn.com about the GamesChart beta program I immediately thought to participate. It was a surprise to me to find that my game Haunted House was at first position for the entire 4 weeks of the beta program!

Actually also my Alice Memory game is also on the chart, even if never more than in the 6th position.

What GamesChart is about?

It’s another way to generate money from you Flash games. The nice thing is that it is not an alternative to the traditional banner you place during the loading of the game. But it goes together.
The main idea is to have publisher to “bid” for which game will be in the chart and this will generate extra revenue to the developer, to the publisher who correctly bid and of course to the GamesChart organization.

This is from Barry White directly from linkedIn group. Read more

Flash AS3 Pixel based circle collision engine

After seeing the Lineball video teaser I got some email asking me how did I make the hollow circle with Box2D, and how to get a smooth drawing using box primitives.

Well, I have to say I didn’t use Box2d, but another library called Collision Detection Kit.

I’ll publish some tutorial about it once I’ll complete the game, but it’s not the point of today’s post.

A reader from Argentina, Adolfo Chacon, sent me an AS3 basic engine to do the same thing (maybe even better) using the concepts I explained soooooo long ago in the Create a flash draw game like Line Rider or others series.

It’s a basic, uncommented script because it’s just a prototype… basically Adolfo took my old script, adjusted trigonometry and did the magic dividing the simulation in steps to manage slower speeds.

I resized it, changed variable names (translating from spanish) and some operators since the auto format option gave me errors when trying to format a<-b, forcing me to change into a<b*-1.

Now enjoy the script Read more

Being a geek in Venezuela

Yesterday I bought a MacBook on the Apple Store using some of the income generated by this blog. Do you know why I could do this? Because I am a geek, and because I live in Italy.

If I lived in Venezuela, things could have been quite different. This is the story of John Freddy Vega, a blogger and geek from Venezuela.

He runs Cristalab, a blog full of AS3 and PHP tips, just like mine. But it’s not as easy as it seems.

« Any self-respecting geek has certain basic needs, and Venezuelans are no exception: smartphones, laptops, permanent internet connection, access to information and, above all, the ability to purchase a lot of stuff we love although we don’t need it at all.

That’s why Venezuela’s technology case is so curious. We are one of the Countries with highest Blackberry penetration, so much so that RIM (Research In Motion: the Canadian company that developes the BlackBerry smartphone) people were forced to know we’re not an African country, we have crappy but still profitable Internet connections and we can even (in many cases) afford a cable TV. Read more

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

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

Come2Play multiplayer API tutorial

Today I want to introduce you a Come2Play multiplayer API tutorial written by Emanuele Ornella from Mind the Move.

Emanuele is a Flash game developer and a board game designer too.

« After the development of my first two games Tokyo Train and Haunted house I am interested in development of a multiplayer game. For this reason I started to study the Come2Play API.

Links to the project: http://www.come2play.com/developer.asp

The goal of the tutorial is to show how to build a Tic Tac Toe game using these API.

The project can be downloaded from
www.mindthemove.com/blog/projects/TicTacToeC2P.zip

These API are basically used to have a communication between one or more clients (in Flash AS3) and the Come2Play server to allow a multiplayer game.

There are 2 type of functions: operations and callbacks.

I am going to use two classes.

- MainTTTC2P that extends ClientGameAPI. This is the main class the acts as controller

- TTTC2PViewer that is the viewer class. In some way, because the game is simple and it is for tutorial purpose, this will work as model as well.

I am not using an event driven approach as in the tutorials from come2play project because I found this confusing the main focus that is to learn how to use the basic API by come2play. Read more

Case study: Vadim Starygin’s total revenue from last two years

If Vadim Starygin does not sould familiar, then you’ll probably know this guy as Badim, the owner of Elite Games and the guy behind Elite Forces series.

Badim allowed me to publish his recap of two years as indie developer and I think you’ll find it very interesting.

Introduction

Two years I have worked as an Indie. Two years fighting for good on behalf of developers, sharing about my earnings and achievements every month. So far I can say this for sure – going off from offices to become an indie was the best decision I’ve made. Another one – sharing my stats with you, my dear colleagues.

Some History

I have released 21 Flash games, 3 iPhone games, launched 1 portal, 1 blog, a forum and a support group. Meanwhile, my personal life has also seen an increase in quality – no crunches, no 16-hour work days. I became a father for a second time. I was able to spend 31 days outside Russia, and two weeks inside Russia =). Read more

Interview with Nick Pearce, the guy behind Shrink it

Do you remember Shrink it? You should, because it’s a very popular game and because it inspired me to write Scaling objects with Box2D – part 1 and 2.

The blog interviewed Nick Pearce from NPGames to share with you some interesting information… Read more

Help needed – War to hackers

You know this blog has been attacked several times by hackers (or crackers, call them whatever you want, I can’t tell you how would I call them).

I tried everything, such as 10 ways to secure your WordPress blog and changing the hosting.

Attacks continue, with injection of malicious code in javascript files.

I had my hotsing service, HostGator, monitoring the activity on the blog and they said “We found a few PHP shells on your account and removed this. This indicates that you have insecure scripts on your account. Please review each script and esure that you are running the latest versions”.

Obviously I am running the latest versions of everything, so I really do not know how to prevent the site for being hacked almost every day.

That’s why I need you… I am not a security expert but maybe some of you are.

I need some hints and tips about finding this insecure script and removing it once for all.

I will update this post with all information you need.

If you are a security pro, I can pay for your service or can give you a lifetime ad somewhere in the blog (but I’d prefer to pay :))

UPDATE #1

The blog has been attacked again. Look how did the modify jquery.js file

And this is the injected code

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