Good Time to be a Flex Coder

Flex.org links to a listing of open positions wanted for Flex developers. If you do Flex stuff (or even can pick it up quickly - which you can) you might want to check out this listing.

Google Gears and Offline Storage

I've been checking out Google Gears today (Hmm. Gears, Pipes) and it seems pretty interesting. I can totally see some interesting uses for it (itty bitty rpg?)

Be the First to Try Ebay's San Dimas Project

Project San Dimas is an application written in Apollo to directly access ebay auctions in a dynamic new fashion. They are auctioning off the first "beta invite" to give someone a 6 hour lead on trying it out. Sounds like a fun idea. The ebay "togo" widget is also pretty interesting on this site. It allows you to embed auctions on any blog/ website.

Planet Yazaar - community additions to YUI

The Yahoo User Interface Library is an excellent base to develop DHTML applications. I use it 100% of the time. This site is dedicated to allowing folks in the community to create add-ons to the YUI and have them set up in a consistent fashion with version control.

Amazing 3D Racing Car in Flash

Carlos Ulloa is one of the creators of Papervision3D - an amazing 3D engine for Flash. His site has a demo of a racing car that at first seems ordinary - a 2d car drives up and beacons for you to "drive " it using arrow keys. The magic happens when you start turning to the left or right and realize it's an amazing 3d model in flash.

CuteGod: A Prototyping Challenge from Lostgarden

Do you have the programming chops of a prize fighter? Does the idea of creating a game engine in an afternoon fill you with delight? And can you not draw your way out of a wet paper bag? If you are a great game programmer (or even an aspiring one) who is graphically challenged, this post is for you! DanC over at Lost Garden is issuing a programming challenge - and backing it up with a great tileset for you to base your game on.

Check out the post to discern the details of the challenge.

Limitless Quest DHTML RPG update

Gee, I actually got some time to code tonight. My butt is numb from sitting in this rocking chair but I've actually managed to pull together some js to render a very simple tile based level. It might not look like much but the level was generated by a simple array of characters, each of which were assigned an offset value of a background image. This is a big milestone for me simply because I'm actually writing code again... even if it is at 2:30 in the morning.

Anyway - if you are at all interested in this dhtml rpg engine bookmark that url as Ill be adding stuff to that link whenever I make progress. It might be broken at any given time - as that url is my "scratch pad" for development.

Help! Simple String Storage API?

Surely in the vast extremes of the internet someone or some team has this feature. I'm looking for a web api which allows me to store and retrieve simple strings of text. It doesnt need to be thousands of lines, but perhaps say as much as a blog post per record. Is there anything like that out there? Preferably with a REST interface and some ability to read/write and output JSON. I know about Amazon S3 - but isnt that more for storing files? Basically I want to be able to store a little bit of information about a player in a game and allow other sites to read/write to that record....

Flex Based 3D Rendering Engine

Outsmart labs talks about how they created the awesome new 3D engine for Flex.

Flex 2 : The HyperCard for the Web?

I've been thinking about how Flex is taking off. Flex + Apollo is the realization of a dream of mine for a long time. I've always envied folks who took to C++ like fish and can create interesting applications in a week. Folks like me who are more "coders" than "programmers" seek to find the fastest route to a goal. Apps like Dreamweaver, Realbasic, and Gamemaker all represent "shortcuts" to application creation. Up until now there's been a pretty big wall between folks who write HTML , CSS, and javascript and folks who write "real" apps. You know, the ones that can erase your harddrive or not have to be connected to the internet to actually work.

I was almost too young for Hypercard, but I know that it represented a huge leap for non-programmers. They could actually create "apps" (or "stacks") With just a few bits of data and some drag-drop action you could create something that does something useful like organize your CD collection or generate a Star Trek quote. I believe that this quality is what is making Flex take off like it is. Sure, under the hood there is alot going on, and I dont pretend to believe that Flex is going to replace the simplicity of Hypercard in anyone's eyes. However, I believe that there has been a huge gaping need for a simple drag and drop application (Flex builder ? ) that allows someone with reasonable HTML skills to create an application that will run on both PC's and Macs (come on Linux support!!)

So, basically what I am saying is that I believe the reason why Flex is taking off like it is, is that it has some of the same qualities as Hypercard did -- data management, GUI features, and a simple save reload cycle that makes feedback faster than waiting for an hour for your app to compile.

I'm just waiting for some enterprising person or persons to create on top of Flex (or Laszlo, or some other flash derivative) a clone of Hypercard. Perhaps a Flex-lite which only does a few things like a button, an image, and a few form elements.

What do you think? Am I way off base here? Let me know.

Limitless Quest - DHTML RPG Engine

Since I'm working on different projects that all involve RPG's in some way or the other, I'm unifying the codebase somewhat. IttyBittyRPG will use Limitless Quest's RPG tile engine when needed, and Limitless Quest will also be a standalone RPG engine in DHTML using YUI. This will allow me to also create an Apollo version that you'll be able to download and run on your own desktop. I've been creating "tile engines" in every language except DHTML it's silly that I've waited this long to do so. Hopefully this'll be the one I can focus on and get working with enough features to attract some rpg developers...

Pictogame - create a game from your picture

This is a great concept! You just upload a picture and pictogame will allow you to embed it in one of many different flash games. You can then share it on your blog, wherever... Fruity.

Primera: DHTML RPG

This is an interesting project who's goal is to create an online RPG. I'm creating something similar to this and it's encouraging to see that it's definitly possible to create a basic rpg using web technologies.

Raph Koster: The Core of Fun

Raph Koster posts the slides for his Etech07 presentation on the "core of fun". It's a nice glance at what makes a game fun - basically challenges on the edge of a user's ability where their actions have consequences in the progression of the game.

If you haven't read his book A Theory of Fun I highly recommend it.

kirupa.com - RPG Programming: Introduction

kirupa.com has a great tutorial on how to create an RPG using Actionscript. Dont forget to check out their great series on Game Story Writing as well.

Troy Gilbert: Getting Started with Flash Game Development

Troy Gilbert of Mockingbird Games talks about getting started with Flash game development. He talks about straight Flash dev as well as working with Flex or Actionscript direct development.

I think one thing that folks dont realize about Flash (game) development is that you dont have to rely on the traditional Flash IDE with it's timelines and movie metaphors for building games. You can now write directly in Actionscript3 or Flex and can do it completely with free tools.

Flex Components in 3D! Outsmart Labs

This is just too cool. Someone has taken Flex controls and embedded them in a 3D flash environment. They are fully functional and interactive. Serious Flash Foo!

Javascript: The Language of the Net

This article talks about how Javascript has won by losing. It's not the best language (in that author's opinion) but it has become the default language of the web. I'd have to say I've never regretted focusing on learning Javascript - to me it's one of the most versatile and useful languages ever.

Coding Sux... or I Never Get Time to Create Stuff

Gee, it's midnight, and I've finally gotten all of the things I need to do out of the way. I'm supposed to be working on my ittybittyrpg project. I've got such cool things to add to it and get it working in a big way. Instead I'm going to probably just fall into bed. How to get time! Perhaps getting up early instead of staying up late... sigh.

Tips for Running an Online Community

If you plan to create anything on the web, you will only survive by creating a community around your work. This is an article from the new site fortuito.us about creating a working online community.

Javascript Creator Talks About Flex Open Sourcing

Brendan Eich (one of the smartest folks I've ever met) talks about the recent open sourcing of parts of Flex and why it's a good thing but not the only thing that needs to happen. The gist of it is that opening the source is only one part of the picture. The commitment to the community that arises from the openness and the willingness to accept projects that take the code in new directions are other aspects of a successful open source project.

Dreamstones: Online Game Meets Wiki

This is a project to combine a wiki - like environment with an online game. It's still in very early stages, but it sounds like a cool idea!

Maker Faire 2007 Photos

I just came back from Maker Faire 2007 and I must say that this is one of the most amazing things I've been to for a long time. From SCA folks walking around to mobile cupcakes to giant robotic giraffe's - the atmosphere was one of creativity, hands-on activities, and just this vibe of "hey, let's create something cool" or "check out what I made" and "here's some stuff - go make something" was really refreshing. My kids really enjoyed it, and I got alot out of just seeing all the things going on. We got a weekend pass, so I think tomorrow I'm going to hole up in one of the free making rooms and create something kooky and fun.

Aveyond II Details Emerge

From Tales of the Rampant Coyote comes news about Aveyond II. The artwork looks impressive and I'm sure the story is going to make fans of Aveyond I very happy. Check out Amaranth's blog for more details.

Creating Flex and ActionScript 3 on the cheap..

This is a most excellent post by a very wonderful flash developer who uses FlashDevelop. FlashDevelop is a text editor with code completion for actionscript and mxml as well as the ability to compile to swf. If you have windows you should definitely check this out.

Also note you can build Apollo apps in FlashDevelop as well.

Star in Your Own Action Hero Movie!

Choose a plot for your movie, upload your face and in 24hrs you'll see a short action movie with YOU as the main character!

UPDATE: I'm an action hero!

Popfly: Microsoft's Answer to Yahoo! Pipes...

Microsoft is leveraging its Silverlight technology to create a mashup creation tool in the same spirit of Pipes. Techcrunch can give you the details...

Frayed Knights Development Diary : Getting Around

Jay Barnson over at Tales of the Rampant Coyote talks about the issues surrounding getting movement working in his new indie RPG Frayed Knights. He mentions initially trying a control scheme from Ultima Underworld but discovered that his memory of it was better than it actually turned out to be. If you want to contribute your ideas and opinions on this upcoming game, post a comment in his forums.

The Ultimate Keyboard - coming in a few days

Imagine if you took tiny little screens, capped them with transparent keyboard buttons and created you own magical customizable keyboard. This is what you might get. The possibilities of such a reconfigurable input device are huge. And its coming in less than 3 days (preorder).

Widgets from PMOG

Suttree demonstrates the new PMOG badges from bud.com. If you haven't tried yet, you should check out this combination game and web life tracker...

Compiling MXML and AS3 on eclipse w/o FlexBuilder

Flex builder is great. I look with great sadness to the day my trial runs out and I have to either find some way to get enough money to purchase it or live with just using the SDK. However some enterprising folks are working on ways to use eclipse and still be able to compile mxml and as3.

Novashell Game Engine Goes Open Source!

Seth (the creator of Novashell) has recently posted an update to the game engine which talks about the availability of the source via a zlib/libpng style license. This is great news as it means that Novashell will continue on even if Seth gets bored with it, and anyone can contribute fixes/enhancements via patches.

Novashell is a great new 2D engine for RPG's and platformers. It's system makes it very easy to create and "mod" games.

PBBG: Persistent Browser-Based Game (s)

This looks to be a site dedicated to promoting the idea that there is a genre of games called Persistent Browser Based Games which involve you playing a game via the web - only the state of the game lasts between sessions. The author of the site seeks to bring the various PBBG's together and share a common language, styles, etc.

A New RPG in the Spirit of Aveyond: Last Scenario

From Tim W. over at Indygamer comes a link to a new RPG created using RPGMaker. It has all the standard sounds and fonts and stuff but amazing backgrounds and character artwork. The game is free for all, but perhaps someone will talk them into selling the game. I'm all for folks getting paid for their hard work. Perhaps this is a debut game - and they'll work on another RPG commercially - since this is top notch stuff.

Anyway if you liked Aveyond - style games you'll really dig this.

Lost Garden: Amazing New Game Tiles for RPG Developers: PlanetCute

DanC over at Lost Garden has just injected another major shot of adrenaline into the indie game world with the release of "PlanetCute" - a set of landscape tiles suitable for rpg's platformers, sokoban clones, and many other tile based games.

I highly encourage anyone and everyone to take these tiles, create something great (and cute!) and let DanC know about it.

Flash-based Isometric 3D Game Engine

Can you say that three times fast? Anyway - games in flash are a hot item right now. This game engine looks very promising in terms of being the basis for some interesting games...

Update RPG Components List

After some great comments from folks here about RPG components, I decided to post a revised list:

1. Persons




1. NPC


2. Character


3. Monsters




2. Places




1. Overmap - World Map


2. Tile Map - Dungeon Map


3. TinyMap (what's this called?)




3. Things




1. Items


2. Crafting


3. Inventory


4. Shops




4. Events




1. Quests


2. Level Up


3. Dialogs


4. Scripting (moving blocks, cutscenes)


5. Battle System


6. Accomplisments (killed monsters, quests completed)




5. Atmosphere




1. Sound Effects


2. Music


3. Particles

Man, that's a lot of stuff! Where do I start? I've usually begun with creating the tile engine, however perhaps I need to step back and figure out what the main "objects" are in the game. Gee I really need to take a day off and get Actionscript down.

Popurls.com looking for Flex Developer

Popurls.com is the site I go to every day - probably 100's of times a day. If you don't know about it - huh? Anyway - just as an indication of how hot Flex development is, it looks like they are looking for a high profile Flex developer. So, if that's you - jump over there and start yourself down the path to some $$$.

Components of an RPG?

As I am mulling over the idea of creating a Flex-based RPG (which, by the way is much more of a task than just making an RPG Engine). I'm wondering what are the basic component parts of a typical RPG?

Let's see:

1) Inventory
2) Maps
3) Overworld map
4) Conversation screens
5) character info
6) battle system
7) items/weapons/magic
8) NPC's
9) Monsters
9) Score
10) save/load

Am I missing anything?

My Game Builder: Create 2D Games using Flex and Share Them

David Golds is working on a really cool project using Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Adobe Flex, and Ruby on Rails. (Perhaps this should be called AAARR! Development)

This is a work in progress on an online system for creating games such as RPG's, Match-3 or other tile-based games. Its very cool. It even has a system of tutorials that you use to "level up" in your skills with the tool! This is a great example of applying game principles to an application.

Check it out and start making interesting games!

ApolloHunter - find cool Apollo Apps

From EverthingFlex comes a link to a cool new website dedicated to Apollo based applications. I can imagine this site growing pretty fast. This is also a good place to check out the kinds of things Apollo can do.

You Think You Know Javascript...

Here is a series of seminars from Douglas Crockford about the programming language Javascript. If you think you know javascript, you are in for a suprise. These are some real eye-opening videos. Javascript is way more than just a way to make popups happen.

Help: Command Line Flex/Apollo on Mac..

As the time is slowly running out for my Flex Builder demo, I'm increasingly concerned about being able to build stuff for apollo. The instructions for using the free command line stuff are for some reason extremely obtuse. Is there anyone working on a simple GUI / installer for the command line tools? I'm not asking for much hand holding, but really - why is it that the for pay tools are just a simple install, but for the command line you have to manually poke around with your system settings?

3D Fabrication using Sugar!

I told you! Fabbing is going to take off in a big way. Bigger than you might expect. Just wait till we begin to wrap our heads around the idea of creating any 3d object you might imagine. First will come mundane things that we already have. Then things like toys and custom tools. Then there will be a new class of "things" which exist purely because of the internet + 3d printers. Like say a complex interlinking wristband that can hold items, or amazing new jewelry that conforms to your own face, or "open source" action figures that come with crazy new weapons or attachments. Just wait.

JavaFX Script set to replace JavaScript?

This article talks about the new JavaFX system - which is going head to head with Apollo, Silverlight, and DHTML/Ajax. The article claims that you'll be dropping your Ajax code in favor of JavaFXScript code. In all honesty I'm extremely skeptical. JavaFX seems like a clunky also-ran 3rd place kinda technology. However, given that it is Java that will give it substantial boost with Java programmers. It looks like it's making a strong play into devices - so perhaps it will make building handheld and cellphone apps easier. As yet I've not seen a single JavaFx app (no demos, etc) so I'll reserve judgment till then. There's some additional observations here.

SoulFu - a 3d NetHack

From the creator of Egoboo comes a new cell-shaded game for folks who enjoy NetHack. If you like your games brainless with a lot of hack and slash you'll dig this.

The 10 Coolest Apollo Apps

Apollo is still in alpha state, but folks are already creating cool applications using Flex / Flash. This is the current "10 coolest" of these apps, but I imagine by the end of the year there will be some real mind blowing ones.

Barbie meets World of Warcraft with new Barbiegirls MMO

You know MMO's are hitting mainstream when there is a Barbie MMO. My daughter plays Virtual Magic Kingdom off and on, and has lots of interesting experiences there. This looks to be another place like VMK for tween girls. If you have a daughter you might find this to be something worth checking out.

Use Flash Components in Flex

If you use CS3 you can now create Flash components to use as "first class objects" in Flex. This effectively bridges the gap between Flash and Flex. Now if someone could do the same for HTML and Apollo....

LastTube - Last.fm meets Youtube

LastTube is an application that lets you mashup last.fm artists and youtube videos. It's really quite cool.

UnNamed Flex RPG Project

I believe that Flex/Apollo can be used to create interesting games. While the Big Guys are off creating interesting enterprise applications, I'm going to do what I love to do best - create games from web technology. I've had several abortive attempts over the years, Amoeba, Unlimited Realms, Sword Magic Kung Fu, etc. but having worked on each of these has led me that much closer to getting a "real" game working.

So, I'm going to take what I know about the web, ideas I have for web-based gaming, and create a simple hack-n-slash rpg using Flex/Apollo. The only way to really learn a technology is to just sit down and create a project, so this seems to be the best way to do that.

I'm going to see how far I can get on "free" graphics, software, etc etc.

If you know a bit about Flex and are interested in helping create an RPG, please contact me.

Can you make games with Flash?

This article is a bit dated but it really goes into detail about why using Flash for games is a smart idea.

Piloting Adobe Apollo

This is an interesting article about Apollo and talks about some of the upcoming features such as mobile support, pdf viewing (and creation via actionscript) ,linux support, and extensions for Dreamweaver and other Adobe tools.

My 1000th post! Indestructo Tank

I looked on my Blogger profile and discovered that this will be my 1000th post! Wow that's a lot of links to go through. Well, this is a game where you play an indestructable tank that you must place in harms way to destroy helicopters via combo moves. It's pretty fun in a brainless way, and I'm sure you'll find yourself playing "just one more game".

Talor Hicks at Yahoo!

American Idol winner Taylor Hicks came to Yahoo! a few days ago for a charity event. It was pretty cool to see him in person. He seems to be genuinely passionate about music and entertaining folks. If you play "where's Andrew" in some of the photos you might see me..

New Casual MMO Startup: Thinglefin

I'm not suprised to hear about another MMO startup - I believe that there are going to be quite a few of these in the near future. The one(s) that will survive will need to find a way to bridge the gap between desktop and web, real life and play, passive watching and active creating.

AdaptiveBlue - Extract and Use Semantic Info from Your Browsing

This browser plugin may seem difficult to understand at first, so let me post a blurb from their site:
BlueOrganizer works to help you simplify and organize your life online. It understands that you and your friends are dealing with everyday objects, like movies, books, restaurants, wines and cars. BlueOrganizer connects those objects with the tasks you want to get done online by instantly connecting your favorite Web sites to each other.

So basically it tracks the sites you go to and others as well. Based on this information it builds networks of relationships between sites that you can use in interesting ways - such as if you are looking at a movie on Amazon, you can jump to Netflix and reserve it, or look up a book and find what all the bloggers are saying about it in realtime. Very interesting!

Hackety Hack - a Ruby Environment for Beginners

If you have kids to are technically inclined or you simply want to teach your kids some programming skills, this looks to be a great choice.

New Web Based Yahoo Messenger Rocks

If you have hesitated to download the latest versions of yahoo IM or you find yourself on machine that only has web access, this is going to knock your socks off. This Flex/Flash based application allows you to access your Yahoo IM as well as keep a remote log of your conversations for later reference. It's fast, and it works well. Give it a try...