TypeScript

I’ve been doing a lot more JavaScript recently and while I’m enjoying it I do really miss the type safety and object-oriented language features provided by ActionScript 3. This is especially true for larger projects where a proper object-oriented approach would be ideal. JavaScript’s typeless and dynamic nature means it’s incredibly easy to introduce bugs […]

Getting to grips with Git

It seems every man and his dog is using Git for version control these days and I’d been feeling a tad left out of late. You see I’ve been using Subversion for close to seven years now both for personal projects and at WeeWorld (we used SourceSafe in the very early days but that’s best […]

Zynga: “With PlayScript we got AS4 for free”

Here’s an interesting presentation from Zynga’s Ben Cooley talking about their cross-platform endeavours with Flash and Adobe AIR. He spends some times exploring the benefits of AIR and the challenges of porting Flash-based browser games to mobile. A significant portion of his presentation is also given over to Zynga’s PlayScript language and compiler, which I’ve […]

Upcoming Flash Runtime Features

Things have been quiet on the Flash and AIR front of late but thankfully there’s news of some exciting new features that are on the horizon. Here’s a list of the ones that I’m particularly excited about: Improved iOS compile times Reduced iOS file sizes Mobile Workers Integrated Physics iOS7 Support GameInput Support on iOS7 […]

iOS Native Extensions

While the AIR SDK offers a fairly comprehensive API, if you’re targeting mobile then you’re pretty much gonna have to rely on a few native extensions here and there. I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised by the number of quality extensions that have been produced by the community, and more continue to pop up every day. […]

Physics and Pixi JS

I spent some time over the weekend adding Box2D physics to the JavaScript version of my endless runner prototype. As you can see from the video below, you can now interact with our little hero, making him run and jump between platforms (once again, apologies about the terrible camera work). The demo may still be […]