Google+ ANE, our first commercial product

We’re glad to introduce our first commercial product: an ANE for Google+!

We’re big fan of Milkman Games’ ANEs, especially the GoViral one. It enables to share a post on Facebook, Twitter, mail… everywhere? Not really. It’s missing Google+! Thanks to our ANE, you will be able to target the Google+ platform for iOS and Android.

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Geophysic, making AIR shine thanks to Feathers

Update: The project has been FWA mobile of the day! Note that this blog post was written 3 months before its publication.

This new project was kind of special for me, I made an iPad application, Geophysic® with one of the best French agency Soleil Noir for the famous luxary watches Jaeger-LeCoultre. No less!
When I was a student, Soleil Noir was the best French agency and we all dreamed to work there! So you could imagine how fun it was to work with them! As a luxury brand, Jaeger-LeCoultre, has a very high expectation of the final product. Combined with Soleil Noir’s graphic designers, it results in a top quality iPad application.

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Dargaud cartography, pure JavaScript isn’t so bad…

New year comes with plenty new resolutions, one of them was to finally give a serious try to a small project into pure JavaScript. I used to swear on JavaScript every time it was mentionned. I made several projects using TypeScript and Haxe, and I’m very happy with those techs. But, if there is some strong libraries (Pixi.js, Phaser, three.js) made in pure JavaScript, there are certainly some reasons !? And when you know that those guys are all ex-flashers, you think that they would use a compiled language. But not at all, they don’t want to depend on a company (since Adobe’s failure on Flash…), freedom feeling you said?

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Scaleform, for the love of Flash

RE-Edit : Scaleform mobile SDK 4.4 is out!

Edit, official answer from Autodesk: “Initial Indie friendly efforts have focused on MayaLT, as the most widely used Autodesk game tool. Autodesk is considering a similar option for their Game Middleware tools (such as Scaleform, Navigation and HIK) which will make them more affordable and accessible to Indies. An Indie friendly pricing model, hopefully coming soon, would allow them to offer the latest version of Scaleform to Indies and not bother maintaining a separate (and older) consumer Scaleform Mobile download. That should solve the problem for Indie devs that want the latest Metal, XCode and 64 bit support.”

We’re in 2015 and Flash is still there. It might be a dying technology but it couldn’t die right now because there isn’t any other tool which is able to replace it. The strength of Flash is obviously its vector animations. However since several years many of the flash developers don’t use the Flash Pro software in their daily job. Now we’re mostly using Starling and sometimes we grab animations from a fla and turn them into a SpriteSheets, or using DragonBones or mostly a SWC file to turn it into textures at runtime. Also there is the fact that we’re not able to reload SWF file using AS3 code on iOS.
Those facts highlight that something is broken in our production line: graphic/animation designers are increasingly dependent on developers. We are not able to take their SWF to make it running on our mobile device, so we must recreate everything ourselves via code and optimized framework (Starling). And hell, I hate doing animations jobs.

I think AAA studios were laughing when Flash was announced dead, because they use it daily. Mass Effect, Tomb Raider, The Witcher, Crysis… all of them use SWF file for their UI stuff. Have you thought a moment that even EA was using SpriteSheets with several resolutions for its menu!? Obviously not, with SWF file they are able to target all resolutions needed with just scaling/stretching their SWF without any loss, from a crappy 640 x 480 resolution to a 4k. However they are not doing it via AIR (it even doesn’t exist on console), but via Scaleform. Let’s have a look on this amazing tool!
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Update an application on several PCs with one click

Hey there, happy holidays!

This last month I worked for Fontevraud, the largest abbey in Europe! I updated their iBar program. Inside the main chapel, they have several touch screens displaying Fontevraud’s informations about Eleanor of Aquitaine, a Quiz, a Pacman retracing the story of a prisoner (the abbey was a prison after the French Revolution)…

The iBar program (PC only) works exactly like an iPad, a main screen launching applications. That was the first time that I worked for a museum, and so there were new kinds of problematics: how to know if a touch screen crashed and notify someone? How to get the errors for fixing them later? How to update the application on each touchscreen without human intervention on each machine?
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Taking screenshots with Flambe, fighting multi-platforms

I enjoy playing with Flambe. It’s the only tech (except OpenFL) which enable you to have a SWF, Canvas & WebGL browser game with one code base made in Haxe (like OpenFL).
Having those three targets, you’re sure to reach your audience at 100%. However one feature, taking an in-game screenshot, may ruin your multi-platforms adventure.
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Mission Eau : being Agile with Flash Pro

missioneauintrologo
Stores/Web:
kezakeau.fr
google play
apple store

Intro : This is a serious game designed to teach players a bit about how water treatment and supply works; specifically how its organized in the Île-de-France region – around paris. The game map is loosely based on that region and divided by areas which corresponds to the master water supply facilities that share connections around the region. The map shows you which levels are accessible to play or re-play, you can zoom it or out with many graphical details. The three areas need to be completed and in order to complete one, you need to connect all buildings together by playing the game levels, and also buy the missing buildings using the coins you collect.

This is not a management game however, you do not have to save money or buy things in advance, it is balanced so you can easily get to the end without worrying too much. The action of buying or clicking buildings on the map will tell you more about what these buildings do and how they relate to others… Their in-game worth also gives players a hint on how important they are.

The challenge here was to keep the package size as low as possible yet keep the graphics at maximum quality.

missioneaumap

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Unity2D the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Hey guys, after more than one year working with Unity, I thought it was time to give some feedbacks. With Tamsen (aka Gsynuh) we worked on a 3D game which has been canceled unfortunately. Anyway we were really happy to use Unity3D for this project instead of using Away3D (we’re mostly AS3 developers).

Now Tamsen is working full time on A Blind Legend (we will provide you soon a blog report on this exciting project!), built with Unity3D. On my side I will help him on specific tasks, I’ve also several AS3 projects, and one game in progress using Unity2D.

For those of you who don’t know me, I worked on the Citrus Engine and so I’m very familiar with Starling framework (a 2D API). This background precision is important to understand my approach of Unity2D.

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