Filed under Flash

Ludum Dare Tiny World: 1 hour down, 14 ideas

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The theme for LD23 is Tiny World. After handling an unrelated work call I got cracking on ideas. I think a lot of these are pretty good!

  • Platformer with impasses that require the player to shrink down to sneak past.
  • Medical War game
  • Tower Defense game with pixel sized monsters that creep up (unnoticed) but grow suddenly when they reach growth pads near the player.
  • Manage resources on a tiny planet with too many people (2)
  • a creature lives in your nose mining boogers + fighting allergens
  • Position Planets in space so they don’t crash into the sun
  • Grow planets in a lab setting + release them into the wild
  • Insect cowboys on a bug ranch
  • Your in a cell and you can only interact with things that pass by your window
  • ON a small planet, every bit of acid rain or toxic waste erodes your planet a little. Stop it before the core is exposed!
  • A platformer where whenever you get hit you shrink a little (everything else grows). The monsters get more detailed and it takes you longer to reach the end (but you never die, just get impossibly small)
  • Some kind of puzzle or obstacle course using close up photography for graphics. Macaroni Tetris?
  • City building game where you can only use pieces of molecules that fit together
  • A game where you destroy particles (ants?) one or a few at a time. Try to get a large score in the hundreds or thousands (1 pt per particle). Violent screams for sfx of course.
I’ll be voting on these using the criteria:
  • Easy / Simple to make
  • Innovative
  • Fun
  • Kelly’s (wife’s) Pick
  • Mims’ Pick (worth 1000 points)
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A message you would never see in a Flash site

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Here’s a message you would never see on a Flash site.


To be fair though, I would be just as frustrated to see a message that says “sorry, iOS users, we can’t show you this page.” I guess my point is that JS isn’t without it’s drawbacks and sites should always degrade gracefully.

Found on the otherwise impressive site: http://flashtml5.com/

Don’t Panic.

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Dear Flash & Flex Interactive Developers, keep calm and carry on. The news from Adobe seems like a big deal now but I’m not sure that it’s soon enough to judge what the long term impact will be. In my opinion, it’s not yet time to panic (is it ever?) and in this post, I’ll talk about why.

First, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the news. I think the best explanation comes from Mike Chambers’ Blog and a corresponding post on the Flex Team’s Blog.

Don't panic! Take a deep breath and look at this cute bunny

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Enabling the Flash Debug Player on Chrome

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After having this happen to me for the third time, I felt that it was time for me to repost this information.

The problem:

You’re positive that you just upgraded to the Debug version of the Flash Player, when you go to test it in Chrome it says that you don’t have the debug version even though it works fine in Firefox, Safari, Opera, and who cares if it’s working in IE because you would never use IE right?

The solution:

You can reinstall the player until you’re blue in the face but it won’t help. Why? Chrome manages it’s own version copy of the player so it can provide automatic updates. You’ll want to disable this version and use your default one.

Open up your Preferences in Chrome. Go to Preferences > Under the Hood > Privacy > Content Settings… > Plug-ins > Disable Individual Plugins (Or just paste chrome://plugins/ into the address bar).

You should see a plug in called Flash. If you click the Details+ button in the top right, you’ll see more info about the plug-in files themselves. You’ll probably see two versions here; one will point to the plug-in installed by Chrome

e.g. /Applications/Google Chrome.app/Contents/Versions/15.0.874.92/Google Chrome Framework.framework/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player Plugin for Chrome.plugin

The other points to the system folder

e.g. /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/Flash Player.plugin if you’re on a Mac

Disable the one in the Google Chrome folder and you should be good to go!

This information was originally provided to me via Arron West’s blog which has more pictures than this post if you still need help.

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Flash is NOT coming to iOS!

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While we’re still hot on the subject of Flash on iOS, I would like to address the other recent news regarding Flash Media Server 4.5 and clear up some of the not-entirely-accurate statements being made.

First, let’s get one thing clear… Flash is NOT coming to iOS per se. To quote the press release from Adobe:

“With Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers can extend their already broad mobile reach via Flash-enabled devices, with the new ability to deliver video content to Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices, enabling them to reach the widest audience possible.”

Unless I’m misreading this, it seems that this is only going to allow Flash Video to be viewed on iOS and only when streamed from the new Flash Media Server. This will be achieved by serving the video in an iOS compatible format so there’s no new player or plugin involved at all. Flash content in general (games, interactive sites, &c) will still bring up that familiar
.

This is only a little bit exciting (unless you host a lot of Flash Video). What the end user will experience is potentially more video content available on their iOS device, perhaps from sites that they couldn’t get it from before, and they may notice a performance improvement. It’s a far cry from the headlines stating things like “Adobe releases Flash player for Apple products” or “Adobe Flash coming to iOS”. Still, it’s a (small) step in the right direction.

Frustratingly, most of the articles I’ve seen are tinged with insinuations that this is some sort of surrender, for example, “Apple did not fold, Adobe did.” Really? Are we still acting like these two companies are having a little schoolyard rivalry? Nobody folded or cried “Uncle”. A company just found a solution to a technology problem. As I said in my last post, this sort of talk creates an artificial sense of certain technologies being inherently “good” or “bad”. It misinforms the general public and turns the choice of platform for a project into an emotional or political battle.

On the other hand, as much as I want people to get the story straight, this is more good news for Flash developers. If the general consensus is that Flash will run on iOS then our clients will perceive it as less “bad” and more “good”. So I guess this is bad reporting of so-so news that will make very good PR for Adobe.