Google announced their plan to roll-out AdSense for games today. Currently the project is in beta and limited to developers with very high gameplay rates(500,000 daily). While my games are not even close to that number, I still find this to be a very exciting day for Flash games. I believe that this validates Flash game development as a true money making industry. Getting big names involved in this business is the first step towards a more fair system for developers.
MochiAds makes a partnership with Google
MochiAds has been doing a great job creating a fair and approachable system to make money from Flash games. This will make what MochiAds has been doing even better by increasing the revenue from typically lower paying countries. My greatest hope is that the income from ad revenue will eventually trump that of sponsorship offers, which is not the most fair system for the developer. The biggest problem is that there will still need to be a fair revenue stream for the portals. The only thing running through my head is that Google may eventually become the biggest game portal in the world. I honestly don’t think it would be out of the question considering Googles record of success. If that were to happen I feel as though developers producing high-quality professional games may be able to make a good living.
Android?
I would also say I am curious if this could be a hint at possibly seeing Flash on the Android OS.
It has been a while since I have made a post. I have been really busy at work and I have been trying to get a new game going. Richard Davey over at PhotonStorm has been adding some really cool stuff to PixelBltz. He has also created a permanent home for PB as well, www.pixelblitz.org. I am very excited to have another person working on this with me and am really starting to feel like this could turn out to be pretty big. I hope to have an updated zip of the project soon.
Flash CS4
Adobe made their official announcement for CS4 yesterday. I have already seen a very mixed opinion on Flash CS4. I honestly am excited about it. Being an artist and a developer, I can still definitely appreciate features such as bones, and object-based animation. Flash did start as an animation package, so it is nice to see adobe going back to Flash’s “roots” a little bit. On the design side, one thing I would love to see more than anything is an improved renderer. Now I know that is no small task, but in my opinion it is necessary. Unfortunately, it is one those features that won’t really sell a new release. The current renderer does OK in most situations, but there are many times when I see my art get jaggy, blurry, or distorted. I am also excited to start playing with PixelBender. I know it has been around for a little while, but I have been waiting for the official release to start learning it.
Another good looking mobile OS with no sign of Flash
This is starting to really bother me. Google released their Android mobile OS this week and no Flash. With the iphone it was easy to blame Apple for a flash-less mobile experience, but who do we blame now? I just wish Adobe would start gaining some ground for us in the mobile market. I have seen many iphone apps making absurd amounts of money and can only imagine the possibilities when we finally get our shot.
I made this a long time ago. It is a experiment to fake 3d rotation with a very 2d character. I recently was tweaking the panda body and thought I would post it. I am not posting the source as it is some old ugly AS2.0.
Move your mouse to make the panda look at the cursor.
The PixelBlitz engine is a bitmap blit engine API that aims to be easy to use and very extendable.
“So what exactly is a bitmap blit engine?”
Bitmap blitting is the process of drawing everything to offscreen bitmaps and then rendering one bitmap to display the visual elements. The end result of this is speed. It is much faster than using the traditional display List approach, when doing anything that is graphically heavy.
Features
Pixel-level collision detection
Layer effects
Horizontal and vertical scrolling
Parallax scrolling
Virtual timeline nearly identical to the MovieClip
Memory efficient
Fast, fast, fast
Demo
Press any key to switch to the next demo.
Project Home
I have created full documentation using ASDoc as well as several examples to get you started quickly. The project is located on GoogleCode at the link below.
The project is licensed under the MIT license. That means you can use it for commercial purposes as well as non-commercial. I am hoping that many other developers will find this project useful.
This has been up for a while, but I wanted to have a link to it from my blog. This was my first published game. The game is called Magma and it is based on the classic game “Bomberman”. I had a lot of fun making it and hope to make a sequel at some point. I have posted a link to play the game and a screenshot below.
I have been playing around with image based particles. That is, particles based on the color values of a source image. Along the way I came across something interesting. I mapped the speed of the particles to the white value of another image. Which causes the pixels to move in a cool 3D-like way. The part I dig the most is that there is no 3D code at all. I think I will be doing more with this in the future, as it has a lot of potential. I have posted a demo as well as the source of this below.
I recently discovered something interesting with using FlexBuilder for Actionscript projects. I would embed a MovieClip symbol from a swf, but I would get compiler errors when using MovieClip methods on the symbol. Very frustrated, I tried everything I could think of, but no luck. Finally, I started tracing out the symbols type using the is keyword and found out FlexBuilder is converting the MovieClip into a Sprite. It would appear that if there is only one frame in the symbol it becomes a Sprite, otherwise it will remain a MovieClip. In short, make sure you check the symbols type before calling MovieClip methods on an embedded symbol.
One last strange thing I noticed is that inside of FlexBuilder embedded MovieClips are sealed unlike within the Flash IDE. The only fix I have found for this is to add the embedded clip as a child of a new MovieClip. I think that is kind of ugly, but it works.
I have finally found the time to get this blog going. I hope to contribute and share as much as possible with a community that I have learned so much from. In the not so distant future I will be posting various experiments I have created. These may come in the form of sketches, animations, or most likely as a hybrid Flash coded experiment.
