I have to admit I was really looking forward to this book. As a Flash games developer I’m always keen to read about interesting new techniques when working with bitmap data. I was also eager to learn about Pixel Bender and FP10 in depth. Sadly this book fails to deliver most of that.

You get a lot of book for your money (650+ pages) but it works on the basis of “list all of the commands in X API, and explain them bit by bit”. The problem being that the explanations are often very short and give you even less information than Adobe Livedocs does. The Blend Modes chapter has lots of large images in it, which are all in black and white, so are of course a complete waste of space (the author does mention as much, but it begs the question why bother having them).

The “Advanced Bitmap Manipulation” chapter starts off by teaching you how to use the dissolve method (a truly quite useless method if ever there was one) and yet it takes up nearly 5 pages of the book. Perlin Noise follows – another 16 pages gone – although at least this one is quite interesting, and it goes into it in a little depth. The whole chapter is really nothing more than going through all the properties and methods of BitmapData. Which is ok, but Livedocs does it just as well and often with more explanation.

The Pixel Bender chapter explains what a shader is, the basics of using the toolkit and creates a very very simple kernel. It does a good job of explaining this shader, but it stops there and doesn’t go any further. It tells you about using shaders for custom filters and blend modes, but gives no further details on how to write them. So you will get precious little more than a brief introduction to PB, certainly not enough to code a shader beyond the example given. This is annoying as the front cover of the book says “Teaches ALL about Pixel Bender” – no, it doesn’t. It barely scratches the surface. It’s nothing more than a “Hello World” of Pixel Bender.

It then goes into 3D. The explanations here are useful but simple. Depth of field, extrusion, z ordering, that sort of thing. In short you probably know it all already. It shows you how to extrude text (by basically cloning the text object a number of times in ever decreasing sizes, so faking it – don’t bother, use Away3D), rotation, scrolling and very basic billboarding.

The rest of the book is made up of chapters going on about the authors own graphics library (aeon / aether) and applying this to text, sound and video. It’s a nice idea but honestly most devs will have similar libraries they use already, and none of the effects shown are very “every day” (how often do you really need to set fire to some text? honestly?).

It’s a crying shame as I really wanted to like this book, but despite its mammoth size it feels very lazy. Chapters are little more than method dumps with the briefest of explanations for each property. Examples are numerous but uninspiring, and there really isn’t a single “Advanced” bitmap effect to be seen anywhere.

I guess depending on your experience level this book could be useful. But if you’ve got the time to check out Livedocs, read a few blogs and basically experiment for yourself then you’ll learn a whole lot more, a whole lot faster in my opinion.

The book is available here on Amazon and all the usual places.

Aww this is just too much fun! Take a 2D sprite, extrude it into 3D and then shave and tweak as required.

Voila, you’ve just described Q-BLOCK and created your first piece of 3D pixel art:

It’s cool pixel art, in 3D (rotation under you control). And you can edit any model you like, change the colours or just add on new parts.

I had a very similar idea to this years ago, and never bothered to do anything with it. I built a small prototype app in DarkBASIC that would build a 3D model from a 2D sprite. But the Q-BLOCK guys have gone a whole step beyond that, and it rocks.

Check out their blog for some excellent examples of insanely good Q-BLOCKery.

I’ve never blogged about Unity before, not because I’ve got anything against it, but just because I’ve no real commercial interest until it gains a lot more mainstream use. However I know a lot of you guys wear both your Flash and Unity caps depending on project, and when this press release from MuseGames landed in my inbox I figured it was only fair to give them a shout. The following is cut ‘n pasted verbatim, so don’t forget to do some research yourself to see if it’s worth the effort – but the prize certainly sounds sweet enough.

NEW YORK, NY – Muse Games (musegames.com), a growing portal for browser-based 3D gaming, today announced the launch of “Immunity,” an indie game development challenge based on the Unity 3D (unity3d.com) engine. Contestants can submit a simple game prototype to be voted on by the development community and general public, and ultimately compete for a $10,000 contract to finish the game for distribution on musegames.com and beyond.

Full contest details and a sample concept can found at http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge

Both professional and non-professional individuals, or teams, are being asked to submit simple Unity-based prototypes demoing their game concept. Voting participants will then be able to play the game and judge its primary mechanic. The top 5 concepts will be granted “immunity” and evaluated by the Muse team. Submission will take place between 8/25 and 10/15, with the $10,000 grand prize winner being announced at the UNITE Unity 3D development conference in San Francisco, Oct 27-30. Participants and spectators will be able to track the progression of the winning game concept to completion on the Muse Games blog.

“As Indie developers ourselves, we believe strongly in the Indie community and want to reward developers for making great games,” says Co-Founder Austin Lane. “Hopefully we can make this model a successful one for the future, and ultimately raise the stakes on browser-based indie development.”

I’m pleased to say that my little “game in a day” creation Bug Box is now released and out in the wild! You can play it over on its games page. Or if you feel like giving it some rating love it’s also on Newgrounds and Kongregate. Quite why I uploaded a game featuring nature sounds, cute little bugs and pure cerebral gameplay to those two sites is utterly beyond me. Hopefully my sanity will have returned by the morning On the plus side it’ll appear on BigFishGames by the end of the month.

I was really excited to receive another couple of books in The Spectrum Games Bible series today. It’s a series of 6 books that present screen shots and mini community written reviews of 1,200 Sinclair Spectrum games released between 1982 and now. Editted and compiled by Paul Johns and Michael Fraser these are fascinating reads.

I love just picking a book and opening it on a random page to see what retro gaming delight (or howler!) will greet me. The games are presented by year and alphabetical order, with a neat index at the back of each should you wish to locate something specific.

Game reviews are often quite short, but for some span a page or two. Nearly all of them have screen shots which really help to jog the old grey matter. As the reviews are written by community members they vary in quality. Some are a little too introspective, focusing on the life story behind that particular game for the reviewer, rather than the game itself. But overall they are still a great read. I’d strongly recommend them to anyone who has an interest in retro gaming, or Flash game development today – as they are a gold mine of ideas and concepts.

The books vary in price as they are printed and delivered by lulu.com, so the higher the page count, the more it costs. The print quality is excellent and the colour covers a nice touch. Layout is clean and clear and I had no printing issues with any of them. If you are extremely flush with cash then you can buy full-colour editions, which have all screen shots in full colour internally. The cost of these editions ranges from between £40 and £70, with postage on-top! However the ones I (and I dare-say most people) own are the colour cover with black and white internal pages. They are a far more reasonable £9 to £10.

Visit the web site for more details: http://www.spectrumgamesbible.co.uk

I’m pleased to announce that Christian Corti has now released v1.0 of the FlodPro Soundtracker replay package. FlodPro extends upon the work done with Flod and adds a bunch of new features, better support for the harder to replay mods, and a brand new ProTracker style replay interface. You get the full source to this awesome player including the flectrum, so you can now learn how to sync with beat events, use stereo separation, change the volume, loop through the samples and more.

Grab the v1.0 download of FlodPro from the Flod page.

EvoFlash have released the first ever 64k intro for Flash Player 10 – “Proof of Concept”. It features some new to Flash effects such as a nice looking multi-ridged fractals voxel landscape and bezier curve tweened particles, with a lovely depth of field effect. This is supported by a thumping 36-voice soundtrack. Again remember it’s a 64KB SWF with no external media.

The intro is nicely put together, harking back to the yesteryear of demo style. It’s a bit “showing off” and self congratulatory, as if they are challenging other Flash demo crews to do better (which might be hard, because there virtually are none!). You are bombarded with the technical facts during the demo, rather than left to enjoy the aesthetics of it. But still, it’s great to see and a bit of a benchmark.

Watch it here: http://mediaerror.com/temp/proof_of_concept_by_evoflash/

Anthology of Flash Demo History Video

The coder behind this demo (Jalava) also gave a presentation at the recent Assembly Summer 2009 Convention entitled the “Anthology of Flash Demo History”. This is fascinating viewing and you can watch it online here. That link is to the h264 QuickTime MP4 file, which is just under 630MB. Don’t let that put you off as  it’s well worth the download or stream if your connection can handle it

A week ago while chatting on a forum RobotJam inspired me by something he said: About how everyone should try and create a “one day game” at least once in their developer lives. As in a proper game, that you then go and and try to sell. And he gave some successful examples of his own.

I thought this was a nice idea. So now, a week later, mine is finished

It’s a simple puzzle game: Just get the butterfly out of the box. There are only 3 levels, easy, medium and hard. It is based on an old Japanese game played with wooden blocks called Hakoiri Shogi.

The core game was done in 3 hours, as you’ll see when you play it (it’s hardly cutting edge technology). Having done that I then set about on the graphics, which took me a lot longer. I bought some of the images from iStockPhoto and then built the scene-up the way I wanted it. The music is from SoundRangers.com mixed with some nature effects by myself. Also big thanks to Eric at Cavalcade Games for doing the great “Level Win” animation sequence for me.

Originally I only wanted the one puzzle (“Easy”). That’s all I had in place and I was pleased I had managed to create a nice little logic game so fast. But then I let my wife play it and she completed it instantly, so I figured it needed more! I added in two new puzzles, the leafy reveal sequence, the in-game buttons, etc. I just guess I couldn’t leave it alone, so I polished it until I felt it shined enough.

Having said that it’s still my absolute fastest game build ever: from concept to FGL in 5 days, working evenings only. Yes I am going to put it up for sponsorship, but I’m realistic and really don’t expect much. My hope is that I could make a few little sales that add-up. As long as I cover my $60 media costs I’m happy.

For now you can play the game only on FGL. My FGL “Friends” can see it right away, as can other devs of a certain level. At the time of writing it’s still pending approval for sponsor viewing. Obviously once it has been sold everyone can play it

The Assembly Summer 2009 Convention is now under way, and  you can watch it live at Assembly TV.

The good stuff doesn’t really kick off for a few hours. But they show lots of cool demos, random interviews and lots of mobile phone adverts until then Plenty more info on the official site.

I’ve got it up and running on a spare monitor watching via the 1MB VLC stream.

There is some great stuff coming up on the schedule (the GameDev Compo tonight for example). But if you miss it, you miss it, until they re-publish the recordings later in the month. Join me on Twitter (when it isn’t being DDOSd!) to chat about it – @photonstorm

Christian Corti has been hard at work on the Flod Replay library, and Flod Pro incorporates the latest version and a whole lot more, wrapped up in a sexy ProTracker style interface! He gave me permission to show you a demo of it, so have a play with this:

Click “Browse” and select a soundtracker module (.mod file) then hit “Play“. Some features work, some don’t. The two sliders on the bottom right are for volume and stereo separation. The numbers 1-4 at the top enable/disable the channels. Clicking through the sample names often reveal hidden messages from the composers

Just check out the replay quality! It’s now playing back a lot of mods better than even ModPlug can, all from AS3 / FP10.

If you don’t have any soundtracker modules to load into it then here is a little zip (655KB) with 5 classic Amiga tunes and the FlodPro SWF. Or you can downloads thousands of tunes from sites like Amiga Music Preservation.

Well this is just too much fun! Grootlicht have just released ActionScript Painter 2.0. I wasted a whole hour this evening creating images in this wonderful package. Remember Painter? This is similar. But automated. And made in AS3. It’s a piece of FP10 wizardary and some of the results are beautiful. Here are a few of my creations:

I’ve a number of games in development at the moment, and I am looking for a quality artist to work with.

I’m happy to consider either direct paid-for work: You give me a quote, and I’ll pay you for your time (and I don’t mind paying a % upfront either). Or we can do something on a game royalty basis (50/50 sponsorship split, ad share, etc). If you are good enough, I’ll even consider both.

My only criteria are that you’re available to actually draw, not just once per quarter! And that you really understand game artwork requirements. So tile maps, explosions, characters, in-game GUI / HUD, buttons, etc.

As you can see from the games I’ve released I need bitmap / pixel art style. But I am not limited to it. If you find it easier to create models in 3DS Max and then render them out to sprites, that’s fine by me. I just want quality end results, I don’t care how you get there. But you must be comfortable working on the pixel tweaking level as I am not looking for a Flash “vector style” artist, sorry. Ideally you probably worked in creating artwork for mobile phone / GBA / DS /16-bit games, or have a style similar to this.

Hopefully this can be a long-term partnership rather than just one game, but we can see how it goes

My deadlines are flexible and my requirements are nearly always small and manageable. I am far likely to be asking you to “Please draw me 6 different coloured 32×32 gems in the style of Columns” as opposed to “We’re remaking Metal Slug with twice as many levels / animations“. I’m realistic. I want to get games made quickly, so my artwork requirements reflect that. You won’t get drawn into some mammoth long project.

If you are interested please send me your portfolio (or links to games that feature your artwork) to rdavey at gmail dot com . Thanks!

After a manic “finishing off” period the brand new version of WebbliWorld finally went live today. It’s out of beta and open to everyone!

We’ve added loads of cool new features including a huge stack of new items, pod colours, t-shirts, hair styles and more. The in-game currency is working and you can buy new items for your house (or yourself).

Lots of other little fixes, updates and changes were added – but best of all did I mention that it’s LIVE! Almost a year of work and now the general public can charge around and explore for themselves

There will be a special promo video going up on the home page tomorrow, but in short feel free to register and play (especially if you have young kids who may enjoy it).

http://www.webbliworld.com

While digging through a huge stack of old Atari ST disks I found one which contained a bunch of my first ever ST games and demos. Created with STOS these are extremely primitive pieces (even by the standards of the late 1980s!) but I found it amusing watching and playing them all the same.

My very first real game was called Octopod. It involved shooting octopus, which for no sane reason would drop a gold coin after they exploded in red meaty chunks. Shoot the coin and you got points. Don’t shoot the octopus fast enough and you lost a life. Playing the game back tonight I found it insanely hard! Either my reflexes are vastly reduced now, or it doesn’t run quite the same under emulation

Eitherway I present you a video of Octopod (sans music, as Camtasia was being a dick re: recording inputs)

At the start you will see it’s inside the STOS editor. At the time this was a quite nice place to work, and reasonably well featured. You could have memory resident programs loaded into membanks, so you could switch between say the compiler or sprite editor at the press of a few keys. The block across the top is where you’d assign a sequence of key commands to function keys. The nasty salmon colour scheme is my fault, the default was white text on black. Remember back then most of us coded using TV sets, so this could be quite painful after extended periods of time!

I do a “list” at the start so you can view the source code and have a giggle. Oh and yes, you had to use line numbers! Only with AMOS on the Amiga did they drop that restriction. You can find out loads more about STOS at the STOS Time Tunnel web site.

I’m now considering re-coding it in Flash as part of the GYM Board 30 minute challenge

This is a sweet piece of work indeed! Using the power of the gnuboy Gameboy Emulator combined with Alchemy, fishf has created a fully playable Gameboy Color emulator in Flash.

While my initial tests don’t show it to be as fast as the real thing (or the gnuboy emulator it is derived from) it’s still a mighty fine piece of work indeed!

So here is Contra: Alien Wars (Gameboy classic version) fully playable in your browser:

Download fgnuboy from here.

Today was pretty momentous for me to be honest.

We finally, finally, FINALLY launched the true public beta of the kids virtual world I have been working on since December 2008.

Called WebbliWorld it’s aimed at young kids (5 years+) and offers a hybrid Flash / HTML multi-user world. You can run around the Flash world, chatting, playing and customsing your space. While checking out the new site content through HTML links. It works in a similar manner to Whirled really.

You can access the beta at http://beta.webbliworld.com

Feel free to register and play. You will need to have your account manually approved before you can “buddy” with other people in-world, but the moderation team are working flat-out this weekend to ensure there isn’t much delay.

While it may look a little “sparse” at the moment, there are some really cool things coming on-line shortly (yes, including games!)

The Technology

It’s built on ElectroServer 4.0.7b, which the ElectroServer team supported excellently. There were quite a few issues with http connections that they worked diligently to resolve for us, so hopefully other ES users will benefit from those fixes too. We’re running on a pretty meaty server that should be able to cope with thousands of connections.

We had a soft launch of the site today, promoting it just on a few dedicated forums that Aardman run (Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit) and we’ve seen a flurry of users registering, walking around and chatting. This is the first MMO world I’ve built, so there was something quite magical about seeing a room full of users all charging about, that knowing that they weren’t fellow office staff

Development has been a truly mammoth task for me. I did all the AS3 code, platform design, server plugins, all of the AMFPHP gateway work, web site php/html/css/javascript, MySQL structure, stored procedures, debugging tools, logging tools, numerous utilities and admin systems… the list goes on and on! Now you can see why I’ve been so utterly frazzled and haven’t released a new game in the past 4 months Thankfully a few weeks ago we hired a really good AS3 developer to help with the project, and his input has been invaluable. You can see a lot of his handiwork in-world, and in the exciting new features we’ll release soon.

Feel free to register and have a play. There are lots of hidden things in there. Click around, as lots of objects do stuff you may not expect. At the very least please edit your pod Wake the pod up by clicking it, then click the “Edit” icon on your toolbar to start placing items. Feel free to post screen shots of your pod designs here!

Oh and if you see “WebbliMunro” charging around the world – that’s me.

I read this thread on the Mochi forums today where a portal owner was complaining about the forth-coming Mochi Coins system, and asking why were they not going to get a % cut from it. I.e. why should the developers get all the money. The post went something like this:

I understand that a lot of developers and maybe even the Mochi gang believe that they don’t need the independent portals…. So if you are a publisher and think that we should also share in this new wealth please clearly state in this thread what you and your portals offer and contribute! Let these guys know what you have done for them lately!

Now it’s easy for developers to read this and get incensed. After all the vast majority of the 30,000 or so Flash game portals out there do pretty much nothing to benefit the developer or their games. In fact I’d go so far as to say they don’t even care about the developer. The game was just another item that popped-up in their Mochi / FGD feed that day. And they do little beyond creating a shit quality thumbnail, or maybe a “we’ll totally screw the look of your game” full-screen button.

Weed out this vast majority of shovel-ware portals and you are left with those that actually care about the games they feature. They have what I feel are some genuine issues. How is this going to effect proper commercial portals, the sort that actively fund game development via sponsorship, and that do treat the games and developers with the respect they deserve.

There are several issues that spring to mind:

No system is infallible – Where does the blame lay?

Let’s face it, Mochi doesn’t exactly have the highest security track record going. Their Mochi API is so easily hacked that script-kiddie programs exist to automate this process. But I don’t limit this section to Mochi alone, it applies to all similar services (such as GamerSafe). All of these systems will have been developed with the best intentions, and by talented development teams. But I wonder did any real security audit ever take place of their code or systems? Having built online booking systems for major corporations in the past I’m all too familiar with the very real, and very complex sets of security measures that needed to be in place. And even if the server side of things is as secure as you can make it, the ActionScript side never can be. The SWF format is so easily hackable that nothing is safe. Up until now hackers have only really had highscore table defacement or competition entry rigging to motivate them. Introduce real money and suddenly you perk the interests of a far darker side of the hacking community. Yes the money in-game might be virtual, but it still translates to real money somewhere along the line.

I’m not advocating that there will be a flurry of hacked bank accounts as a result of this. Because nearly all the Flash micro-payment systems I have seen use trusted 3rd parties to deal with the actual transactions. But as soon as real money turns into digital goods, all it takes is for the ownership of these to be hacked and things start to fall apart. How happy would you be if you logged in one day to find your GamerSafe balance had been wiped out? Or all those items you bought in the latest Mochi Coins game had suddenly vanished? You’d be pretty pissed. And who would you take it out on? Most likely the portal that delivered the game to you in the first place.

If portals start receiving a barrage of emails from extremely angry site visitors who have had their virtual game items stolen, there is nothing they can do but explain that they are not responsible and to pass those people onto whoever is. Of course “pass the buck” isn’t very good customer service, and will leave a sour taste in the mouth of those involved. The damage this could cause to a portals reputation could be significant.

I’m a Zend Certified PHP developer as my primary profession. I’ve been doing it for over 10 years, and right now if I was a portal owner I would be scared as hell. I would like to see professional code audit reports from all the major transaction vendors as a first step that they take the security of their systems as utmost priority.

That still doesn’t address the issue of hacked games of course. We all know that it’s impossible to 100% secure a SWF. Once decompilation has taken place and fake requests / responses start getting fired I believe it’s only a matter of time before vulnerabilities are exploited.

Will Micro Transactions Result in Reduced Spend on Sponsorships?

Portals primarily sponsor games for two reasons: To draw people to their sites, and to keep people on their sites. The new games offer incentives for users to remain loyal, and serve as magnets to get them in the first place. Lots of portals spend a lot of money making this happen. They’ll sponsor a few “large” exclusives and lots of smaller games with custom logo / API work to make those games sit better on their sites. On the whole portals get a very good deal on the price they pay for games. But with the advertising market in the dire state it’s in right now a lot of them are no doubt seeing much smaller Google AdWords checks than they did a few years ago. In short I bet the smaller ones, or ones without alternative income streams (like skill gaming sites) are struggling.

If they start seeing developers making income from the games as they exist on their web sites, as they going to want to offer even less money than they do already because of this? Are some of them even going to argue that in order to carry a Micro Payment enabled game then they won’t pay you anything because they will be making you money anyway? I can see why both of these arguments will occur.

If We Can’t Control the Content, We Won’t Feature the Game

When selling games lots of portals already have quite comprehensive “Your game cannot contain …” lists. Think about this: If most of them don’t even let you link your developer logo to your own web site, what hope in hell do you have of them allowing a complete payment system?

One of the arguments is that they cannot control what you have linked to. During testing your logo may link to a perfectly nice developers site. But once live you could change it to the latest Goatse.cx and it is their visitors who are affected. Or (possibly even worse to them) one of their loyal visitors may link out via your game to an even better portal, with cooler features, and move their daily gaming fix over there. Portals are extremely precious about their visitors, the market is fierce so I can appreciate why. A whole section of a game that links out to an external payment site, or sucks in game enhancements or awards that could feature anything, must be frightening to them. What if that “Rocket Launcher” item suddenly turned into a “Giant Spurting Penis” a few weeks later. It’s an inherent lack of control over the content that scares them.

Paranoid in the extreme? Yes. A little short-sighted / stuck in the 1990s web mentality? Yes. Highly unlikely to happen? Yes! But not impossible. To portals who make money from their users the potential of a “scandal” like this could be a big issue.

If the Micro Transaction System Dies, Our Content May Die!

The whole GameJacket incident royally screwed over a lot of portals who carried their direct-linked content. If a portal sponsors a game with a transaction component which suddenly dies (servers go off-line, get hacked, company goes bust, etc.) then unless the developer was very careful about how that was implemented it could mean the entire game is crippled as a result. I think this is a very real problem. I know for certain that a couple of my games would literally stop working once the game ended should Mochi Leaderboards vanish overnight. I recognise this is bad practise on my part, but I’d place good money on the fact that I’m not alone. Transaction enabled games could very easily have similar issues. Perhaps less of an issue for portals who took your game from a Mochi feed for free, but definitely an issue for those who paid for it.

Change is Coming Portal Owners … Evolve or Die

So far I have done nothing but defend portal owners in this article. I’ve given nothing back to my fellow developers, who really want to try and make some money from these new systems. I drafted a whole section devoted to developers and then realised that I didn’t actually need it. Because the whole “issue” of Micro Transactions isn’t actually an issue at all. It’s something that is happening, and it isn’t going to stop.

Right now we’re at the crest of the Micro Transaction wave. Some early adopters will wipe out, and others will find new and lucrative revenue streams open up to them. But what is absolutely certain is that this isn’t a flash in the pan. This isn’t going to go away. Some portals may put up a fight and not carry such enabled games, but as more and more games start to feature these kinds of benefits it will become the norm, not the exception. Once the really great games start doing it the portals will have to face-up to the fact that in order to carry the latest cutting-edge Flash games, they will have to adopt this new trend, or sink and die.

This change is still new, but it’s happening and it’s only going to snowball and get more intense. The game developer / publisher relationship is symbiotic. One needs the other. Without the players that portals provide, the transactions will fall flat on their face. Without great games the portals will do the same. It’s time for portals to wake up and smell the coffee, because this is going to happen regardless. There are some very valid reasons why they should be apprehensive, and I can only hope that the transaction service providers deal with these issues comprehensively.

I’m sure it means we’ll start having to broker new deals with portals. $1000 + 10% from in-game transactions for example. But this isn’t a bad thing, and I look forward to it. My next game will definitely be GamerSafe enabled (if they approve it) so I’ll be curious to see how it effects take-up rate from portals. I’ll be sure to report it here.