Russian Roulette

December 16, 2009 · 1 Comment

I tend to undertake personal projects that are way too ambitious and almost always never get finished. However I think recently I’ve started to learn that if I ever want to do anything cool outside work I’m gonna have to be more realistic about what I can undertake in my limited spare time.

So last month I decided to make a fairly simple Flash Lite mobile phone game that was fun, a little edgy (please don’t sue me Tim Langdell), and would appeal to a crowd of people in say, the office or at a party. If you’re lucky enough to own a Nokia S60 3rd Edition phone you can now have a great time playing my russian roulette game. Ideal for parties, drinking games or making bets with friends. And if you’ve ever thought about playing russian roulette for real then this is a great way to get some practice in first!

Careful you don't blow your brains out Gregory
So far the response has been positive and for Star Wars fans out there I couldn’t help but add the Wilhelm scream for when you eventually shoot yourself. The current version only works with non-touch screen Nokias but I’ve been itching to do something for the S60 5th Edition devices since I got my Nokia 5800, so work on a touch-screen version has already begun. I’ll keep you all posted on its progress.

Come to think of it, with the release of Flash CS5 on the horizon it might be something worth porting over to iPhone. Then again I think there are already a few similar apps available from the App Store, plus my list of iPhone game ideas is starting to get out of hand so adding another might not be wise.

You can get the S60 3rd Edition version of Russian Roulette from clickgamer. Enjoy!

Oh and a big thanks to MacDog for giving me a loan of The Deer Hunter, which was the inspiration for my game.

Flash Training for .net Developers

December 15, 2009 · Comments Off on Flash Training for .net Developers

At WeeWorld the majority of our projects are split evenly between Flash and .net, however very few developers are cross-trained in both. As part of our ongoing effort to be agile I was tasked with giving our .net developers some Flash training.

Spread over 6 weeks, the guys have been spending their Friday afternoons working through some tutorials I put together covering the drawing tools, timeline animation, and ActionScript 3 basics. It’s been interesting and as I thought, they mostly struggled with the timeline and Flash’s basic drawing concepts. Being C# developers however they were all up and running with ActionScript very quickly.

Get Adobe Flash player

I tried to make the course material as interesting and fun as possible with the final exercise asking them to create an audio cassette that streamed an mp3 file when clicked. It’s been a while since I had to do any real timeline work myself so I thought I’d give the exercise a go. You can find my attempt embedded above – Just click the cassette to start streaming some audio.

Thanks to Brown Eye Superfly for letting me ‘borrow’ their song ‘Any Other Way’. Hopefully this iTunes link to their album will stop them coming round to my door to beat me up.

Now I’m thinking it might be quite cool to port the audio cassette to mobile. An iPhone version would be nice. Could even get it running on a few Nokia devices using Flash Lite.

XML Based FLA Files

December 14, 2009 · Comments Off on XML Based FLA Files

I’ve been quite impressed by the announced features for Flash CS5, with the ability to write apps for iPhone being the one that has gotten the Flash community most excited.

One upcoming feature that seems to have been overlooked by most people that I’m particularly looking forward to however is the new XML based FLA format. Anyone who uses source control will know what a pain it is trying to merge FLA files back to the trunk from a branch. You’ve basically got two options.

  1. Open the two FLAs and attempt to manually copy the new changes from the branched version back onto the trunk. 
  2. Simply copy the branched version over the trunk version and hope that you don’t inadvertently destroy someone else’s changes that have already made it onto the trunk.

With FLA files now being saved out as XML we no longer need to worry about this, instead letting a merge tool do the work for us. The other added bonus is that this should theoretically allow multiple developers to concurrently edit the same FLA.

XML based FLA files open up a host of other interesting opportunities. For the first time you’ll be able to write code to dynamically create FLA files, or simply parse an existing XML FLA file before making changes to it. It’s all good stuff.

Hullo and Welcome

December 14, 2009 · 1 Comment

Welcome to my first ever blog. It’s something I’ve been threatening to do for some time now but never seemed to get round to it. I seem to have a bit more spare time on my hands so hopefully I’ll be able to keep updating it regularly.

It’s mostly going to be a development blog tracking whatever personal project I’m currently working on. Where appropriate I might also talk about the latest goings on at WeeWorld and you’ll also find my latest thoughts on the Adobe Flash platform.

I’ve been tinkering with Flash Lite over the last few years so don’t be surprised if my posts are heavily slanted towards Flash for mobile.