Latest Posts

• By Rich

  Tags

  book, Friends of Ed, review

  Posted in

  Book Reviews

  7 comments

  My review of Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects

  2nd Sep 2009

  7

  I have to admit I was really looking forward to this book. As a Flash games developer I’m always keen to read about interesting new techniques when working with bitmap data. I was also eager to learn about Pixel Bender and FP10 in depth. Sadly this book fails to deliver most of that.

  You get a lot of book for your money (650+ pages) but it works on the basis of “list all of the commands in X API, and explain them bit by bit”. The problem being that the explanations are often very short and give you even less information than Adobe Livedocs does. The Blend Modes chapter has lots of large images in it, which are all in black and white, so are of course a complete waste of space (the author does mention as much, but it begs the question why bother having them).

  The “Advanced Bitmap Manipulation” chapter starts off by teaching you how to use the dissolve method (a truly quite useless method if ever there was one) and yet it takes up nearly 5 pages of the book. Perlin Noise follows – another 16 pages gone – although at least this one is quite interesting, and it goes into it in a little depth. The whole chapter is really nothing more than going through all the properties and methods of BitmapData. Which is ok, but Livedocs does it just as well and often with more explanation.

  The Pixel Bender chapter explains what a shader is, the basics of using the toolkit and creates a very very simple kernel. It does a good job of explaining this shader, but it stops there and doesn’t go any further. It tells you about using shaders for custom filters and blend modes, but gives no further details on how to write them. So you will get precious little more than a brief introduction to PB, certainly not enough to code a shader beyond the example given. This is annoying as the front cover of the book says “Teaches ALL about Pixel Bender” – no, it doesn’t. It barely scratches the surface. It’s nothing more than a “Hello World” of Pixel Bender.

  It then goes into 3D. The explanations here are useful but simple. Depth of field, extrusion, z ordering, that sort of thing. In short you probably know it all already. It shows you how to extrude text (by basically cloning the text object a number of times in ever decreasing sizes, so faking it – don’t bother, use Away3D), rotation, scrolling and very basic billboarding.

  The rest of the book is made up of chapters going on about the authors own graphics library (aeon / aether) and applying this to text, sound and video. It’s a nice idea but honestly most devs will have similar libraries they use already, and none of the effects shown are very “every day” (how often do you really need to set fire to some text? honestly?).

  It’s a crying shame as I really wanted to like this book, but despite its mammoth size it feels very lazy. Chapters are little more than method dumps with the briefest of explanations for each property. Examples are numerous but uninspiring, and there really isn’t a single “Advanced” bitmap effect to be seen anywhere.

  I guess depending on your experience level this book could be useful. But if you’ve got the time to check out Livedocs, read a few blogs and basically experiment for yourself then you’ll learn a whole lot more, a whole lot faster in my opinion.

  The book is available here on Amazon and all the usual places.

• By iLKke

  Tags

  color, comic

  Posted in

  Art

  0 comments

  Weave Webcomic

  28th Aug 2009

  0

  Recently I did web design for a nifty new webcomic called Weave.
  Check it out here.

  

• By Rich

  Tags

  3D, pixel art, Q-BLOCK, Retro

  Posted in

  Cool Links

  5 comments

  Q-BLOCK: Create 3D Pixel Art Online

  27th Aug 2009

  5

  Aww this is just too much fun! Take a 2D sprite, extrude it into 3D and then shave and tweak as required.

  Voila, you’ve just described Q-BLOCK and created your first piece of 3D pixel art:

  

  It’s cool pixel art, in 3D (rotation under you control). And you can edit any model you like, change the colours or just add on new parts.

  I had a very similar idea to this years ago, and never bothered to do anything with it. I built a small prototype app in DarkBASIC that would build a 3D model from a 2D sprite. But the Q-BLOCK guys have gone a whole step beyond that, and it rocks.

  Check out their blog for some excellent examples of insanely good Q-BLOCKery.

• By Rich

  Tags

  competition, musegames, unity3d

  Posted in

  Game Development

  4 comments

  $10,000 Unity 3D Indie Developer Contest

  25th Aug 2009

  4

  I’ve never blogged about Unity before, not because I’ve got anything against it, but just because I’ve no real commercial interest until it gains a lot more mainstream use. However I know a lot of you guys wear both your Flash and Unity caps depending on project, and when this press release from MuseGames landed in my inbox I figured it was only fair to give them a shout. The following is cut ‘n pasted verbatim, so don’t forget to do some research yourself to see if it’s worth the effort – but the prize certainly sounds sweet enough.

  NEW YORK, NY – Muse Games (musegames.com), a growing portal for browser-based 3D gaming, today announced the launch of “Immunity,” an indie game development challenge based on the Unity 3D (unity3d.com) engine. Contestants can submit a simple game prototype to be voted on by the development community and general public, and ultimately compete for a $10,000 contract to finish the game for distribution on musegames.com and beyond.

  Full contest details and a sample concept can found at http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge

  Both professional and non-professional individuals, or teams, are being asked to submit simple Unity-based prototypes demoing their game concept. Voting participants will then be able to play the game and judge its primary mechanic. The top 5 concepts will be granted “immunity” and evaluated by the Muse team. Submission will take place between 8/25 and 10/15, with the $10,000 grand prize winner being announced at the UNITE Unity 3D development conference in San Francisco, Oct 27-30. Participants and spectators will be able to track the progression of the winning game concept to completion on the Muse Games blog.

  “As Indie developers ourselves, we believe strongly in the Indie community and want to reward developers for making great games,” says Co-Founder Austin Lane. “Hopefully we can make this model a successful one for the future, and ultimately raise the stakes on browser-based indie development.”

  MUSE GAMES LAUNCHES “IMMUNITY,” A $10,000 UNITY3D-BASED INDIE GAME DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGE

  Competition provides aspiring game developers with unique opportunity to finance their game idea, and lends support to nascent browser-based 3D gaming industry
  
  NEW YORK, NY – Muse Games (musegames.com), a growing portal for browser-based 3D gaming, today announced the launch of “Immunity,” an indie game development challenge based on the Unity 3D (unity3d.com) engine. Contestants can submit a simple game prototype to be voted on by the development community and general public, and ultimately compete for a $10,000 contract to finish the game for distribution on musegames.com and beyond.

  Full contest details and a sample concept can found at http://musegames.com/community/immunitychallenge

  Both professional and non-professional individuals, or teams, are being asked to submit simple Unity-based prototypes demoing their game concept. Voting participants will then be able to play the game and judge its primary mechanic. The top 5 concepts will be granted “immunity” and evaluated by the Muse team. Submission will take place between 8/25 and 10/15, with the $10,000 grand prize winner being announced at the UNITE Unity 3D development conference in San Francisco, Oct 27-30. Participants and spectators will be able to track the progression of the winning game concept to completion on the Muse Games blog.

  “As Indie developers ourselves, we believe strongly in the Indie community and want to reward developers for making great games,” says Co-Founder Austin Lane. “Hopefully we can make this model a successful one for the future, and ultimately raise the stakes on browser-based indie development.”

  About Muse Games:
  Muse Games was founded in 2008 to bring 3D multiplayer casual gaming to the internet’s doorstep. The web platform launched in May ’09 and has been growing its game catalog and adding features since. Recently Muse has opened up to outside developers who wish to increase the exposure and monetization capability of their Unity 3D games.

• By Rich

  Tags

  bug box, puzzle, releases

  Posted in

  Games

  1 comment

  Bug Box Released

  25th Aug 2009

  1

  I’m pleased to say that my little “game in a day” creation Bug Box is now released and out in the wild! You can play it over on its games page. Or if you feel like giving it some rating love it’s also on Newgrounds and Kongregate. Quite why I uploaded a game featuring nature sounds, cute little bugs and pure cerebral gameplay to those two sites is utterly beyond me. Hopefully my sanity will have returned by the morning 🙂 On the plus side it’ll appear on BigFishGames by the end of the month.