In keeping with my desire to learn as much about how the game development world works, I have spent some time looking into developing simple games in Flash over the course of the last couple years. Recently, I renewed my pursuit of this game medium, and I have been striving to learn some of the ins and outs of Actionscript 3. Having written a handful of basic Flash applications in Actionscript 2 — from the loader and controls of a full media presentation to an MP3 player and dynamic slideshow — I feel I had a solid understanding of the principles of Flash, both in the timeline, layering and scripting realms.

However, when I began working with AS3, whole worlds began to open up as I saw the potential unleashed by implementing a much more true OOP support into the code base. One of the most useful things that AS3 encourages is the understanding and use of the layering hierarchy of sprites and movie clips on the stage. As you add children to specific sprites or movie clips, they inherit their parent’s visibility spectrum and appear truly as part of that element on the stage. This may well have been a feature of AS2 as well, but I never took the time to learn that aspect deeply enough, since I did most of my work from modifying timeline animations.

I decided some time ago that one of the best ways to learn Flash would be to write a game that implements many of the features, such as vector layering and stage positioning. Furthermore, with my addiction to Tower Defense (TD) style games, I thought it only fitting to develop one myself and share my learning progress with others who may also be interested in the same type of application. This post is the first in a series that will follow my progress from manually drawing the GUI on which the game will be played (this post) to creating the basic Creeps and Towers which will make up the substance of the game. For those who are anxious to get started and don’t want to read everything in detail, I will provide a download link at the close of each post with the full source for the project to that point.
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While somewhat old news to some, the Google App Engine is an amazing tool allowing developers to tap into the scalability offered by the Google framework while developing entirely standalone applications. What’s more, along with the offer of the code base to build from, Google also allows developers to host their projects, at no cost, on the Google App Engine server (up to 10 applications per user, no less). I was excited to learn of the project initially, and the more I have delved into it, the more enthralled I have become.

For years now, I have wanted to have the means by which to develop a small tactics style RPG game, and while I have had the basic coding knowledge needed (not to mention buckets of ideas), it has been difficult to bring myself to the point of actually taking on such a daunting task. Having the opportunity to build on the data store and framework Google has offered with their App Engine has given me that extra little boost to begin development on one of my long time goals. Read more

A friend has recently posted about Wordle on his blog, and after reading the post and trying out the site for myself, I thought I would be remiss not to make a small post about this amazing tool myself.

This creative idea uses a Java applet to read any word grouping you care to type, or you can simply point the tool to a website which offers an RSS or ATOM feed. From there, the app takes over: creating a stylistic word cloud that is quite aesthetically pleasing. With multiple color schemes, layout options, fonts and other details to allow for personal manipulation of the cloud, you can find the balance that is right for you. The image posted above was the first random creation that was generated by Wordle when pointed at this site.

Enjoy!

Well, those of you who know me in the least are aware of my passion for video games. I have, quite literally, been a fan of console and PC gaming for as long as I can remember. My parents will vouch for the fact that, on my fifth birthday — before I could read — I was situated in front of our living room TV set with our TI-99/4A on my lap, an open code book next to me, pecking character by character until I had basic animations appearing on the screen. I vaguely remember those details, although I can remember playing games like Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus, but the passion for gaming is still there to this day.

My focus, however, has shifted from simply being a placid gamer to wanting to delve more into the inner workings of the game development process and the gaming industry in general. Choosing web development as a career path has given me more of an insight into the principles that make games work, and I greatly admire those with the knowledge and fortitude to stick with it during the grueling development process, but I still have that burning desire to be more actively involved in the industry in some way.
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Well, it never ceases to amaze me how much I don’t know about the technologies I use every day as part of my job. No, I’m not saying that I don’t know how to do my job, but I’m rather saying that there are realms of possibilities the likes of which I’ve never imagined could be accomplished with such ease. I have always enjoyed learning bits and pieces of *NIX command line, shell scripting and other functionality that lies beneath – or rather, behind – my everyday web work, but I have never really looked into writing command line scripts.
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Some of you may not immediately catch the sarcasm intended to be portrayed by the title of this post, but anyone who knows my coding preferences or has heard me complain (in a good way, of course) about the server structure with which we are currently stuck with at work, you will have no issue with understanding the tongue in cheek nature of this post. I have actually been amazed at how many times in the last week I have run into servers that have yet to offer PHP5 in their configuration settings, even as an option.

I have had the privilege to make the aquaintence of a few new friends and work with them on a project, which I will cover in depth in another post, and through some web work I’ve done for the project, I’ve been made aware of three separate hosting companies (which shall remain nameless) that still do not have PHP5 installed on their servers. What’s more, after some checking, some of them apparently do not even offer it as an option. This has made me appreciate my current hosting company that much more, for they not only offer a choice between stable versions of PHP on my account, but they go to the extreme of allowing me to declare a PHP version for each individual domain or sub-domain that I wish to set up. As a developer, this sort of flexibility is invaluable. Read more