Friday, July 04, 2008

Design for Mobile conference

If you have a chance to be near Kansas, US between 22-24 September, 2008 don’t miss Eldridge Hotel, Lawrence and Mobile user experience conference.

In their own words: "Design For Mobile will be the first North American mobile user experience conference. This will be a two-day conference focused on strategy and tactics for user research, product definition, interaction and other design, and usability testing."

Check speakers list.
Posted by flanture at 13:42:42 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

WoW accounts marketplace

For fanatic gamers, earning some cold hard cash is never far away. One way of doing it is to create a game and sell it. You can also publish it online for free, make it extremely popular and earn from advertisement on game page. If programming is not your style, another option is to buy game from some greenhorn developer for few bucks, make it popular, etc. Off course I’m not talking about World of Warcraft here, I’m talking about easy to create, addictive to play small Flash games. Check Kongregate and you will easily find bunch of young developers ready to sell you their own creations for $50 - $200 bucks.

There is another option to cash it out. You may earn few bucks by playing games. Specially, you may earn few bucks by playing already mentioned World of Warcraft. Did you know there exists WoW accounts marketplace where you can buy or sell your wow account? BuyMMOAccounts.com Incorporated are legitimate company based in Calgary, Canada. They claim 95% success rate of accounts trade. You can use PayPal to make transaction.



However, selling and buying WoW accounts is against the TOS of game owners, Blizzard Entertainment®. How BuyMMOAccounts is legitimate is something beyond the reach for Flanture. You have been warned.

Wherever there is a product, even a virtual one like WoW account, marketplace will always find its way to exist.

Posted by flanture at 14:45:43 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Flash Player Forever

Classic UFO game, with 80's atmosphere comes from PlayerForever.




PlayerForever is small enthusiastic team who loves good games and flash games development.




Posted by flanture at 15:19:11 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Friday, June 13, 2008

Adding mc speed using Numeric Stepper component

In previous example, our hero has constant speed set to 2. Speed is defined inside doTween function, as 6th parameter for xT and yT tweens. Off course, this speed doesn’t have to be constant at all. We will use Numeric Stepper component just to show how to change speed parameter. Instance of Numeric Stepper is "step". We change mentioned parameter from "2" to "step.value".

download hero_v2 source file.

 


When making a game, we will not use Numeric Stepper, but we can change hero speed in this way in relation to health or game level or whatever.

Posted by flanture at 14:51:07 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Character elastic movement


Flash game characters doesn’t have to move only in standard way, press left arrow key to move left, right arrow key to move right, space to jump etc. In this new flash game, main character (hero) will move differently. Hero will be dragable and on click, he will perform elastic move. Start position and destination position will be symmetrical in relation to Stage center. Enemy can be destroyed only if mouse is not pressed, otherwise, hero health will decrease.

Now, code. First we import related classes:

import mx.transitions.Tween;
import mx.transitions.easing.*;

We need to define simple onPress, onReleaseOutside and onRelease methods for movie clip of our hero, mcHero. Method onRelease has two functions, findSimPoint() and doTween(). It is obvious that findSimPoint() calculates symmetrical point of hero x and y in relation to Stage center. DoTween(), well, performs the tween! Code comes with comments.


Download hero.fla




Posted by flanture at 15:48:03 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday, May 19, 2008

Second Chance - ASTRO


For a very long time, there was opinion between game developers that Flash Platform is not so good game development platform. Right now, with release of Flash Player 10, this might change just a little bit in another direction.

 Flash Player 10, code name Astro is still in beta, but already brings some very interesting new features. Native 3D effects, available to anyone, is the first reason why we should pay attention. Enhanced drawing API for easy runtime drawing and visual performance improvements with extended hardware acceleration with GPU Compositing and GPU Blitting take advantage of new ActionScript3.0 Virtual Machine (AVM2) introduced back in Flash Player 9.

Don’t forget Dynamic Streaming that automatically adjust to changing network conditions, Dynamic Sound Generation and File Reference Runtime Access that let’s you load/save files from/to server without knowing server language or have access to server. This is not all! Check all new features at Adobe Labs, but from this summary you get my point when I say it is time for reconsideration.





Posted by flanture at 02:12:07 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Free Flash Games Tutorials


Best recourse I came across lately is the list of 20 free tutorials which can help you start with your Flash games development. Sometimes it’s hard to find even few tutorials and this list is definitely worth reading.

1. Flash Racing Game Tutorial
2. Balloon Shooter
3. Guess Next
4. Space Shooter
5. Platform Game Tutorial Redux: All The Basics
6. Make a dynamic hangman game with XML and ActionScript
7. Snake Game Tutorial
8. Create a survival horror game in Flash tutorial
9. Creating a Flash Lite Game Tutorial (Flash game for Mobile Devices)
10. Flash dodge ball game
11. Create a flash artillery game
12. Creating a Sniper Game in Flash
13. Chicken and Eggs Game
14. Mini Car Race Game
15. Flash ball game with visual effects
16. Flash Fighting Game tutorial
17. Simple Jigsaw Puzzle Tutorial
18. Basic Flash Hit Game Tutorial (Video Tutorial for Beginners)
19. Create a flash game like Security 2
20. Complete Flash pool game with high scores

Big Thanks to Aravind A and DezinerFolio .
If you know for any good tutorial out there or you have one, post it here.

Posted by flanture at 12:30:58 | Permanent Link | Comments (2) |

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Credit Cards

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Next post is written by guest blogger Charles
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You go to your mail, open it and to your belief you see a credit card. It seems that today credit cards are flashing up everywhere. You have credit cards for bad credit, credit cards with zero percent APR, you even have credit card scams. The question that many people ask is who would give a person a credit card with a bad credit history? The answer is, a lot of places.

There are credit card companies out there that actually believe people make mistakes. Yes, you have a repossessed car on your credit but what’s the reason? It is only human to make mistakes, especially when it involves money and credit card companies have a tendency to look past all those negatives and bad credit that you may have on your credit report.

Now we have pre-paid credit cards. Pre-paid credit cards are basically like a bank but all on a card with no checks. Pre-paid credit cards are basically substitutes for your own cash. With a pre-paid credit card no one is lending you cash of any sort, it is your own money that you will be putting on a pre-paid credit card.

As you’re reading about credit cards you probably see a lot of talk about APR. Standard APR, Balance Transfer APR, Default APR and Cash Advance APR are only a few of them to list. Now, are you wondering what the difference with these APR’s is? The difference between the listed APR’s can seem confusing to you when you first hear it but once you begin to understand it you will see that it really is pretty simple.

Standard APR is talking about the interest rate that the credit card will be going up to AFTER the introductory APR period is over. Cash Advance APR is the interest rate you will be receiving for those cash advances. Balance Transfer APR is that interest rate that you will be getting for any of your credit card balances that you transfer over to your newly created credit card. Last we have Default APR and that is the interest rate that your card will be going up to if you are ever late on your payments or even go over your credit limit.

Credit cards can lead to a world of debt so you will need to make sure that you do not get too greedy with that “extra” money. Yes, the truth is that you can use credit cards in order to build up your credit but you will need to actually show some paid off credit cards before places begin to look at that as positive. When you have active credit cards that have not been paid off yet then places may look at you as if you were in debt. So play it safe before you get fifty thousand dollars in debt because credit cards can do that to you THEN you will wish that you never opened that first credit card that came in the mail. In other words, credit cards can help you as long as you don’t go getting too greedy on them.

Posted by flanture at 22:36:46 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Advertise Here

If you want to create buzz about your website / product / service now you have a chance to do this with advertisement on this blog. You can check statistics here and also you can check page rank.

Contact me via email flanture [at] gmail [dt] com or leave comment here with your info and I’ll get back to you with prices.

Thank you.
Posted by flanture at 16:02:27 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Monday, March 10, 2008

Tracking like a pro


I was surprised with this simple but incredible piece of technology, GPS Tracking Key which recently helped police to solve murder case when George Ford was arrested in Chenango County for the death of a 12-year-old girl. Read entire article how his wife suspected he was having an affair and she placed GPS Tracking Key in his truck.

This small, pocket sized device that receives signals from the twenty-four Department of Defense satellites orbiting the earth. The internal computer accurately determines the GPS location of the device within 2.5 meters and records detailed travel activities every second. Data logged includes route traveled, velocity, direction/orientation and duration of device remains stationary. Cheap price for something with enormous number of uses. Device have strong magnet and it is water resistant. GPS Tracking Key is powered by just 2 AAA batteries.


What is really amazing is that this device is fully compatible with Google Earth Software and maps the GPS coordinates of the person or vehicle accurately. You only have to plug it in nearest computer and read valuable data. I already see how teenagers all over the world are helpless in explaining why they took a car without permission. How about people on dangerous missions in distant areas? This is a life saving piece of equipment for some professions. With such accuracy of 2.5 meters, GPS Tracking Key can play significant role in mapping.

Check also cool demos like Tibet vehicle tracking, hike vehicle tracking and Las Vegas strip vehicle tracking with Google Earth available on their website.

Posted by flanture at 20:37:10 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |