Archive for the ‘Caught our Attention’ Category

Protecting our work

Hi

Almost two years ago, I went through the trouble of using some trials of encryption/obfuscation software in order to protect our swf files. I don’t know how that worked out for you, but to me it didn’t work at all.

I tried and retried and tried again. I messed around with several settings and it never, NEVER worked perfectly… or actually it did if I turned out most if not all useful stuff.

Well… I really put it behind my back and never really thought about it again. But today I tried it again… and it worked… and it worked nicely!

So this is good news and since it went so nicely I’ll be making a small series of posts with our findings, from initial testing to a final game. Stay tuned.

Jesse Schell and the Future of Games

Got this video from a post on FGL forums and took the whole 28 minutes to see it. I hope it is obvious for everyone involved in the game development industry that games are getting everywhere, but the way Jesse Schell explains what is going on and where he thinks it will go is just overwhelming.

A must see video from one of the most intelligent and visionary game designer and game design theorist out there.

http://fury.com/2010/02/jesse-shells-mindblowing-talk-on-the-future-of-games-dice-2010/

New Bold Pixel Engine tutorial

Hey everyone, just a heads up. A quick yet well detailed tutorial on how to use Bold Pixel Engine’s LocalData toolkit class which manages your game’s shared objects.

But… we didn’t write it. The author is Rasmus Wriedt Larsen and he just let us know that he put it up in his gamedev blog.

Take a look.

Best of Online Games

I was feeling good about me, our work and a fine goal we met today. I was preparing to leave a short note on twitter or a small blog post, not about it, but more because of it…

I opened my email client and started to read what seemed to be one of the many “I love your work so much that you have to mention my work!” emails we receive. But as I was reading it, I felt it was something different…

You see, I’m a firm believer that one of the problems of the Internet is that everyone is looking for a special name, something that looks good and easy to read and retain as a domain name also, but few, very few, live up to the tag of their own name. This means that a site called Best of Online Games must be different. It can’t be yet another gaming site, it can’t be yet another script game portal. It has to at least try to be something different.

So I visited the site, noticed a nice article about us (which was the reason for the email we received in the first place) and noticed a fine philosophy behind it. Best of Online Games looks as a nice game portal, but features developers, news and other articles about this industry niche that is online gaming.

I really enjoyed it and I hope you all do to. After some months off, Best of Online Games is back and we wish them good luck! Go visit it at http://www.bestofonlinegames.com

A Love Letter to Flash Game License

I haven’t visited FGL much, mostly due to the fact that we don’t have any self releases. But out of nowhere very late in yet another coding night, I decided to take a break and visit it. I noticed a blog there! “Woot!” – I thought – “Let me add this to my feed reader!” but first I read the only post that was there and I have to say that some of the thing Chris wrote almost made me sad.

You see… I have a dream, a dream I share with my partners, my family and my partners’ families. The dream of building a game development studio, big or small, indie or not, our work, fortune and future will tell. But a dream like this is built in large part of the people we work with, the people with whom we share projects, success and failure. A dream like this is built of risk, of honest discussion, of doubts… a dream like this is built of people that rely on us and people who we rely on.

There were times where the dream could end and I would face a harsh reality. One of those times we found a website called Flash Game License. Because of it we sold some licenses, we made a bit of a name for ourselves, but more important, we were able to keep the dream going one step after the other until we got to current day where there’s no time to make a game to put on FGL, but hey, no complaints here, after all, we are creating games! Would it be possible without FGL? Maybe, who knows? But the honest truth is that it existed and we found it when we need it the most.

But Chris wrote:

I do think that many of these incidents were unintentional, but the result was that developers were emailing me and asking me to take a particular position. Then I started to worry that this was widespread, that there were many developers that had a bad impression of us due to things being said behind our backs. I brooded over this.

I have no idea what really happened, but I felt that we should state our feelings towards FGL, so to Chris, Adam and everyone else there, you have our public and humble thank you. You know that we don’t always agree (oh well, Adam does at least, I’m always complaining to him!) but we have your back and as far as it is up to us, no bad impression will stick for long.

Don’t worry about it and keep up the good work because the indie flash development community needs you guys strong and focused.

/Vlad runs back to finish the damn project!

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