London Flash Platform User Group
Tue, 21 February, 2012 - 12:49:09
This Thursday (23rd Feb) I will be attending the London Flash Platform User Group meetup. Mike Chambers will be talking about the future of Flashincluding recent changes to the Flash platform and how the player and the actionscript language will evolve in the future. I personally see the focus continue to shift to gaming. The majority of web designers seem to shun Flash, especially with the emergence of CCS3 and HTML5. Yet at the same time we are seeing new developments on the gaming side of Flash with the use of Unreal and other 3d engines in web and mobile games. I expect to hear the evenings second presenter talk alot about this. I have been following Lee Brimelow and his work for years now, via his FlashBlog, his gotoAndLearn tutorials and on Twitter. It was one of his tweets that first made me aware of the event in fact.
I'm looking forward to meeting some other Flash Developers and seeing what I can learn from them. It should be a great experience. Plus, there's always the chance I might win the Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection!
Ideas...
Tue, 07 February, 2012 - 13:02:13
I made a minor change to the site today, renaming the "widgets" section to "ideas".
When I first created the widgets section, my intention was to have a page where I could upload bits of Flash that weren't necessarily whole games, but were work that I wanted to display. I considered a few names for the page; misc, flash, stuff, etc and finally settled on widgets. However, thinking about it again recently, I realised that the widget title wasn't really appropriate. I think ideas is better because it more accurately describes the content there. In particular I can use the page to upload half finished game ideas without having to polish them up as "finished" games. Expect to see a few posts appearing in that section soon.
Yanmania... Website troubleshooter
Mon, 30 January, 2012 - 9:59:07
In the last week I have run into problems with two otherwise stable websites. What was the source of these problems? People of course!
The first problem was with this site, It was a sneaky one that must have appeared sometime since my last post on Jan 17th. I didn't notice it until I tried to upload a new image to the art page. I found that I just couldn't publish. I knew the site had been working correctly. I checked the form fields, checked the templates, cleared my cache and tried different browsers. Then, when I tried modifying a template, I found I couldn't do that either. At this point I wondered if my expression engine installation had corrupted somehow and considered updating the version of EE that I was using. However, it turns out that the free version of EE that I use is no longer available and that I would have to upgrade to a freelancer license. I considered this for a while and am in fact still considering it despite having fixed the issue. The free version I am using does not entitle me to support and does not allow me to use the current features. Though I don't have support, I was still able to google my way to another user's post on the EE forums. He had the same issue as me and, it turned out, the same solution. My hosting company had tightened up the security on their servers, preventing malicious scripts from running. This had the adverse effect of preventing the submission scripts within EE from running as well. I contacted them and they were able to add an exception there and then and I was able to continue posting my images.
The second issue was with a MODx website I created for a colleague. In his case he had created a second site hosted on the same webspace. He had moved the files for the site into a sub-directory and this of course broke everything! The front end was missing all of the text and images, which are loaded from the CMS, leaving only the theme. Once I connected to the FTP I could see that he hadn't moved the associated MODx files and folders, so I moved those into the new subdirectory. That fixed some of the images as the relative file paths were now correct but the content still wasn't appearing. Also the back end wasn't accessible. I knew there must be a further issue with file paths but I didn't know where to look. Once again google saved the day. Searching for my problem I found a guide to moving a MODx site to a sub-directory. I went through the steps, updating the config files and performing a reinstall to be safe and the site was aback up and running. My colleague was very happy (and so was I).
Happy 2012!
Tue, 17 January, 2012 - 15:15:15
A belated happy new year!
I'm hoping to be a little more prolific this year. Last year I only completed one game (Thirty!) so that shouldnt be too hard to top. As mentioned before, with so many games half finished, if I can make time I should be able to see a lot of them through to completion.
Finding that time might be difficult however as I'm getting married this year and have so much to sort out! Also, if I'm honest, a fair bit of my time right now is being taken up playing the awesome Skyward Sword. As mentioned in my top 5 games post I'm a huge Zelda fanboy so it will come as no surprise that I'm loving the game.
Another great game that I mentioned in the same post was XCOM:Enemy Unknown. A remake has been anounced for the end of the year. Some great screenshots here. Wonder if my five year old box will run it!
Also, this week, Lee Brimelow posted a couple of video tutorials about creating Finite State Machines for controlling the flow of your games. As a user of Flixel and its FlxState functions, I have become used to using states to control games. This tutorial provides a neat way of setting an FSM up for yourself and your non Flixel games.
Ludum Dare
Mon, 19 December, 2011 - 10:40:12
After seeing what people had achieved during Ludum Dare 21 I decided that I would definitely enter the next competition. Ludum Dare 22 was held this weekend (16th - 18th december) and despite my best intentions I just didn't have time to produce anything. I had a work Christmas party on friday night, a friends birthday on Saturday and more friends round for a pre-christmas dinner on Sunday. I should count myself lucky that I have an active social life but I was a little dissapointed that I didnt get to participate. Ludum Dare 23 will be in a few months time, but with my wedding fast approaching I may miss that as well!
On the plus side, I have started to trawl through the 700+ entries and there is some inspiring stuff. Not least of which in notch's minicraft. If I didnt know he streamed its development live I'm not sure I'd believe that it was created in 48 hours! Its really interesting to see what can be achieved in a short space of time. As has been said before, a game may take a long time to build and polish but making the "toy", the essential mechanic of the game, can be done relatively quickly. With that prototype you can quickly tell whether the game is fun or not. That is what I will take away from the competition as a "spectator".
How successful the 700 entries are remains to be seen. Games are rated only by fellow participants which makes sense. Only those who have also spent the last 48 hours staring at a screen, chasing out bugs and avoiding sleep will truly be able to appreciate the effort that will have gone into each game.
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