Give it a go and let me know what you think!

Suzuki Kizashi Vs. Evil Weather

All design was done by Siltanen & Partners

I’m very pleased to announce that one of my latest projects has just gone live. The Deepening – Select Your Own Adventure Edition has just gone up on Atom Films. Go give it a look, it’s hilarious.

The video is a Good Cop / Bad Cop action show where you get to choose what happens next. It was created by the brilliant Duncan Brothers who asked me to help build the Flash portion of it. Enjoy!

deepening.atom.com

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has recently formed a new special interest group for Flash games and Flash in the gaming industry. This promises to be a great resource for aspiring Flash game creators. Check out their Wiki and user groups if you’re interested in the subject.

Last night, I participated in the Iron Flash competition at the LA Flash Users Group in Venice Beach. As in Iron Chef (my favourite television show), the participants are all skilled Flash users pitted against one another with the goal of creating something interesting within a strict time limit and featuring a common “ingredient”. In this case, the ingredient was a set of pictures of ‘pucks’, specifically, R. Blank’s dog Puck, Puck the faun, Puck from the Real World, and a hockey Puck. We had 3 hours to make something out of any or all of the pictures. My fellow competitors were Jon Ruppel of Hooky Interactive and Ben McMaster (also at Hooky) who both made some awesome stuff in such a short time. UPDATE: All of the entries have been posted on the LAFlash site.

It was a great experience, and not just because OMG I WON!!!

My entry was a video game featuring Puck the dog. I was considering other physics based games involving the hockey puck and the dog somehow. Then I thought of using the dog instead of the hockey puck and somehow that reminded me of the sport beloved in Canada, Curling! The scoring system is a little wonky but if I may say so, it’s not bad for 3 hours work. Here are screenshots (click to link to the game) along with the source code:

Download the source code

I’ll be the guy that looks like this:

Why?

Auditorium is an elegantly simple puzzle game made in Flash that I found through a post on Daryl Teo’s Blog. The player must direct a stream of particles towards fixed collectors to complete a harmonious melody by manipulating movable icons that represent physical forces. The gameplay is quite simple to pick up at first but the puzzles soon become quite challenging. Every level of polish has been applied to the game from visual effects, like the fade between each level, to the pleasing audio clips generated by the particle collectors. The highly sophisticated elements of particle physics, sound, and design blend together to create a deceptively minimalist experience. Perhaps best of all, multiple solutions are possible for many of the puzzles leading to more exploratory gameplay.

Play Auditorium

Check out the latest ridiculous multiplayer chaos unleashed by those crazy, crazy test tube babies at IILWY, Balloono! I developed this game, but it wouldn’t exist without the awesome assistance of EJ, Ken, Daniel, and Charles. For taking it the last mile (or five) and adding lots of great art and polish, THANKS! Great work you guys! Oh yeah, and you’re cool too, Mark.

Keep coming back, ’cause I’m sure IILWY will be adding more levels and other bonus monkey jams! And hey, if you like the game, it couldn’t hurt to vote for it on Newgrounds, right?

As a member of IGDA I was recently informed of an event in January called the Global Game Jam and I wanted to share it with you. Basically, game developers around the world meet up for an intensive, creative session to create a game from nothing but a few rules and a group of strangers. It sounds really fun and I hope to be a part of it next year.

Global Game Jam

I may be in the (rare?) position of being highly interested in two disparate technologies. The first being an online scripting language standard governed by ECMA (used in Javascript & Actionscript). The second, an open standard for real-time rendering governed by the Khronos Group (OpenGL). In recent days these two languages have faced most unfortunate developments. First the ECMA script 4…

On Nov 7, 2006 Adobe announced the contribution of their ECMA scripting engine to the open source community under the name “Tamarin”. Tamarin is also being used as the JS scripting engine for Mozilla Firefox under the name “SpiderMonkey“. It seemed like a good idea at the time of release. But now look at the situation: we have AVM2, directly connected to Firefox AND the ECMA committee –slowing the progress of Actionscript and the Flash Player (and the internet for that matter). Needless to say, this is a disappointment. But it doesn’t end there…

Though having plenty of contributors, the realm of real-time rendering is primarily controlled by Microsoft, Nvida, ATI/AMD, Apple, and (more recently) Intel. Microsoft hasn’t really contributed to the Khronos Group because long ago they decided to pursue their own 3D graphics rendering API known as Direct3D. The evolution of OpenGL has become painfully slow while DirectX and Direct3D are becoming the (de-facto) standard. Finally, the Khronos group promised to improve the long lost API by introducing an object-oriented structure in stark contrast to its current state machine model. That was in October 2007. Last week the specification was finally unveiled and it remains largely the same. Not only is this a big let down, but it will definitely damage all future 3D software and game development releases for non-Windows platforms (including future consoles). Very unfortunate.

DISCLAIMER: Both of these developments are FAR more complex than what this post outlines -and there’s justification behind both developments. But on the whole, they both seem bad for everybody (or just me?).

Take this FLA animation.

As you can see, there is a simple animation using a guide layer and labels on the key frames.

The following SWF uses KitchenSync to control the same ball animation. As you can see, the duration and easing functions of the animation can be controlled. You can even animate backwards!

See it in action.

The source that controls this is here.

package {
	import flash.display.MovieClip;

	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.KitchenSync;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.action.*;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.action.tweentarget.*;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Bounce;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Cubic;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Linear;
	import org.as3lib.kitchensync.easing.Oscillate;

	/**
	*	Demos the TimelineController which controls the animation of a MovieClip's timeline.
	*/
	public class FlashIntegrationTest extends MovieClip
	{
		protected var test1:MovieClip;

		public function FlashIntegrationTest()
		{
			super();
			// initialize kitchensync.
			KitchenSync.initialize(this, "1.5");

			// add a movieclip from the library
			test1 = MovieClip(new AnimationTest1());
			addChild(test1);

			// define the start and end frame with strings or ints or FrameLabel's
			var startLabel:* = "start";
			var endLabel:* = "end";

			// set up the TimelineController tween target.
			var tweenTarget:TimelineController = new TimelineController(test1, startLabel, endLabel);
			// Animate the ball with a linear ease.
			var tween:KSTween = KSTween.newWithTweenTarget(tweenTarget, "1s", 0, Linear.ease);

			// animate the ball backwards with a bounce tween
			var tween2:KSTween = tween.cloneReversed();
			tween2.duration = "4s";
			tween2.easingFunction = Bounce.easeOut;
			tween2.addTrigger(tween);

			// animate the ball with an oscillator
			var tween3:KSTween = KSTween.newWithTweenTarget(tweenTarget, "10m", "1s", Oscillate.sine);
			tween3.easingMod1 = 0.3;
			tween3.addTrigger(tween2);

			// start the animations
			tween.start();
		}

	}
}

Pretty cool huh? We’re creating a new TimelineController and setting the boundaries of the animation then passing it to a new KSTween object. Each of the three tweens use different parameters and are triggered by the end of the one before it.

You can download the entire thing and play around with it.

TIP: this actually broke Firefox for me but worked in Safari.