Tag Archives: games

Silly Family, being an indie dev

AIR, AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Mobile, Profile, Starling, , , ,

Edit: Apptoonomy is no more. Selling games is even harder than making ones. I only focus on Da Viking Code now as a cross platform developer.

The game.

Hey guys, this blog post is very special for me :
– it’s my hundredth article!
– my first game as an indie dev is out!

100 blog articles
When I started blogging 4 years (already!) ago, I didn’t imagine that someday I’ll reach the hundredth article. I started mostly as an exercice in style, improving my english communication skills and coding different things for sharing (unpretentious). I continued and now when I give a look in the past I’m smiling : I can see my evolution, how I’m better as a programmer, and all the different things I did in 4 years.
Also thanks to this blog I had my first client as a freelancer! I would recommand to any programmer to have a blog and post each month an article (that’s what I’m doing since 3 years) on what he is doing.

Apptoonomy
With some friends we created a new company, Apptoonomy. So does it mean that I’m not anymore a freelancer at Da Viking Code? No way! What does a programmer on his spare time? He is programming. With Apptoonomy we mainly focus on making our own games. Let me introduce the first one!

Silly Family
silly1Silly Family is a familly-fun Puzzle Game! Do you know Suzan? Of course you do! Suzan is my father’s son’s sister’s mother’s mother! Suzan is my grandma!!!

In Silly Family, you train your logic by resolving more and more complicated enigmas about increasingly crazier families! You’ll have to find the family relationship or run through the family tree.

We offer 3 different gameplays, 5 families (maybe more) and crazy designs… not to mention the animations! Also a multiplayer mode to defeat your friend!

Obviously questions are generated dynamically, I wrote the algorithm using (family) trees and recursivity. That was funny especially managing the different languages (the application is currently available in English, French, Spanish and Italian). We’re waiting a little bit for German, it won’t be easy 😉

Being an indie dev
Silly Family is the first (finished and published) game that I made as an indie dev. It’s really a longest process than programming games for clients. A client has to be sure (or at least should) that his game design is strong and developer implementation won’t show design flaws. Otherwise programmer’s bill may be painful. I started to develop Silly Family in October 2013 so six months ago. And obviously we already had a game design document. But so many things changed during its developement. Also you can add the fact that you must be satisfied with your game’s direction, and to still have the will to work on. Anyway, it’s a very interesting experience and it improved my skills as a game designer. We’re already looking forward for the next game!

Technology
Obviously I used my beloved Citrus Engine for making this game and Starling framework. The IPA size (before submitting to Apple) is less than 17Mo! How did we achieve this size? It’s thanks to DragonBones and its awesome .dbswf format. AS3/AIR technology was perfect for making this game!

Flambe versus the World!

AIR, Entity/Component System, Flash, Haxe, HTML5, , , , , , ,

The game.

The (HTML5) engines war
You probably didn’t miss the engines war of the previous month: Unity announced Unity5 with WebGL support (which I already pre-ordered hurrah!) and Unreal Engine 4 did the same with an incredible price. That was for the big guys.
From a more indie friendly point of view, PixiJS continue to kick ass with awesome new features (cacheAsBitmap, blend mode for canvas, SpriteBatch…). Phaser using PixiJS as its rendering engine, is becoming much more popular every day and obviously more stable. PixiJS has really the wind in its sails because OpenFL switched to it for its HTML5 rendering engine!

Continue reading Flambe versus the World! →

Finally I made a serious game

AS3, Flash, ,

After several years in the gaming industry making mostly casual games, it was about time to give a try to serious game, right?

mef-gameMon Exploitation Forestière, only available in French at the moment, offers to the player to grow a forest. He will have to manage different tree species having their own properties (life duration, units collected, …) and cope with natural elements (fire, storm, …). The client wanted to responsibility players about the fact that a forest need to be maintain.
As cool features to develop there were saving players game in database, facebook connect and tiles’ OOP management.

Let’s start for some explanations with the latest one:
Each tile is designed into Flash Pro and inherit from a class with its properties (tree or empty tile for example). This way it’s very easy to modify it in real time, switch or even save it!
For saving the game, I’ve basically create a JSON with each tiles informations (+ score etc.), since everything is OOP it’s very easy to read its data and save it. For loading a save game it’s the same process. Load the JSON with all tiles informations and create objects.
Concerning the Facebook connect, I didn’t use at all the AS3 SDK but the php one. It’s very useful since you may use it for UI combined with JavaScript SDK. And using the php one in the backend is very safe 😉

Alef is out!

AIR, AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Nape, Physics, Starling, , , ,

Hey there,

It has been a long time since I wrote my first game, Kinessia, with the Citrus Engine (and start contributing), one and a half year. Less than one year ago, I made an other one, Tribus, using a Citrus Engine’s port in Objective-C. That was my first project in Objective-C so the source code of the port shall not be very clean, that’s why I’ve never released it officially.

We all know the problem making a framework / library and never use in real context project. That’s why I started my carreer as a freelancer 4 months ago, to be able to make applications / games for companies and show what can be done with the Citrus Engine. And now I’m proud to add a new reference to the engine: Alef.

Continue reading Alef is out! →

Citrus Engine V3 and a new website!

AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, , ,

Hey there,

I’m glad to announce the V3 release and a new website for the Citrus Engine! It has been a long and hard work. Most of the new tutorials and news will be displayed on this new website. Don’t know how I will manage this blog on Citrus Engine subject due to the new website, I will certainly replicate some contents.

Anyway I let you explore the new website 🙂 Don’t hesitate to give some feedback.

Create combination of physics objects in Citrus Engine

AS3, Box2D, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Physics, , , ,

Some days ago, I said that November will be an awesome month for the Citrus Engine. So what is coming?

We’re the 2nd, November is already here and something huge is already happened to the CE : a tutorial on gotoandlearn made by Lee Brimelow, an Adobe Game Developer Evangelist! Definitely, an excellent tutorial to get start with the Citrus Engine. There’ll be other tutorials later, a new website and the forum’ll move on Starling website. Most of the future game will use Starling so that’s a good move! We’re not forgetting the 3D part, don’t worry 😉

Everything should be ready for the next Adobe Game Jam in Chicago. So that’s the plan. Now let’s go for a small tutorial.

Continue reading Create combination of physics objects in Citrus Engine →

Create a game like Tiny Wings

AS3, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Nape, Physics, Programming, Starling, , , , , ,

Tiny Wings is really a cute game and very fun to play thanks to physics content! It uses Box2D. If you’ve never played the game, give it a quick look :

Generate those type of hills with a physics engine is complicated for a novice. You’ll find cool tutorials on Emanuele Feronato’s website using Box2D and an other on Lorenzo Nuvoletta’s website using Nape.

Someone asks me if it was possible to create this type of game with the Citrus Engine, absolutely! So let’s go for a quick tutorial.

Continue reading Create a game like Tiny Wings →

Moved from Box2D Alchemy to Box2D AS3

AS3, Box2D, Citrus Engine, Flash, Games, Nape, Physics, , , , ,

In the Citrus Engine, people knows that I’m very attached to the Box2D Alchemy version. Thanks to Alchemy we should have better performance than the pure AS3 version. Also this Alchemy version had some cool features mostly on the way you could manage collision : you don’t use a gobal contact listener like in any Box2D version, you use something very closer to AS3 event management. Example :

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override protected function createFixture():void
{
	super.createFixture();
 
	_fixture.m_reportBeginContact = true;
	_fixture.addEventListener(ContactEvent.BEGIN_CONTACT, handleBeginContact);
}
 
protected function handleBeginContact(e:ContactEvent):void
{
	_contact = e.other.GetBody().GetUserData() as Box2DPhysicsObject;
	if (!e.other.IsSensor())
		explode();
}

I love this way. Anyway, many users ask me to change it… let’s go!

Continue reading Moved from Box2D Alchemy to Box2D AS3 →