Archive for the ‘Caught our Attention’ Category

Packt Publishing and Book Reviews

Hi everyone

I really like books. My biggest flaw is not owning a e-reader, but it will arrive mid-September, don’t worry! While I read some non-technical books occasionally, like most of you (our dear friends and blog readers) I mostly read technical books. One of the issues with technical books is to find those that match your needs. Like me, I bet that you will not buy a book that doesn’t pack the the promise of growing your knowledge considerably. I also bet that you, again, like me, have bought a book or more that was less than what you expected.

On occasion I’ve read books that seem awesome and has time goes by prove themselves wrong… so is life…

The best books I bought were through word of mouth. People I trust having a opinion on a specific book that would meet my needs. Reviews help also, naturally. Bringing the two of them together on our blog sounds fantastic to me!

Packt Publishing released two new books that sound amazingly interesting for todays flash market space. Flash Multiplayer Virtual Worlds and Flash 10 Multiplayer Game Essentials. The book titles are self-explanatory are they not?

I’ll read the books in the near future and review their content from flash developer to flash developer. All that is left is to say thank you to Packt Publishing wish them a lot of success and hope for more books that are interesting for the flash gamedev community.

Game Design Perspectives

I have several motivations to write this blog post. I knew I wanted to call it game design perspectives because it is about game design and perspectives about it but I didn’t really know how to put it. So I decided to put up an image and made a search on my favorite free image plugin. I searched for “perspective” and found this one: perfect.

When I coded my first game I had no idea what game design was. Some years ago, right before starting up Vortix with Marco and Diogo I had no coding knowledge whatsoever so I focused on game design. Problem with game design back then was that everyone wanted to be a game designer… it was the game designer wanabe boom period.

Back then (and it wasn’t that long ago) every guy that played games and wrote two paragraphs of a Tolkien ripoff considered himself a game designer, me included. Many of them didn’t make it up to the professional stage. Looking back, the only ones I know that got into the game development industry are either artists or engineers. The only game design wanabe that managed to pull it was me… and I’m more a programmer than a designer nowadays.

The perspective back then, the passion, was about the game. We all steped our of the dream and learnt that game design is about decision making, getting feedback and more decision making. All game designers, wanabe or not, had only one goal: the game! Like the two crossed railway lines, game design is all about crossing left and right sides of the brain. See the whole while addressing the details. Be able to analyse data and crunch numbers while being able to… well… feel…

It is sad to observe that on a market such as the flash game space the perspective is that a designer’s objective is to make a game that is sponsorable. I find this not only sad, but wrong.

Squize commented on a blog post of his that:

(…) it’s all about the creative process now, so I’d rather push myself and fall short than work to someone else’s design. (…)

Julian from LongAnimalGames mentioned today in the FGL Chat that he considered more interesting the psychology of players than game development itself.

It is a trend I find in many high profile developers. They care about business and particulary money when hiring, when selling, when paying, when discussing deals. Money doesn’t get in the way of design and they have other interests… the creativity, the psychology, the technical expertise and others. It is interesting that these are the ones that make the great, memorable and amazingly sponsorable games. I know one exception… that simply confirms the rule.

Like them we are not against the commercial or business side of all this and we take it very seriously, but game design is about the decisions, the rules, the player, the big shiny paradigms. Production, marketing, whatever, that’s the business part, our job as designers is to reach as many players as possible. We might argue that the bottom-line, that’s what will make the game sponsorable, but it is not the motivation when making game design decisions. Money is a unnecessary distraction while designing.

The Essential Guide to Flash Games Review

I bought this book before its release. It took months for it to arrive which was a pain since my expectations were quite high. You see… I’m an 8bitrocket fanboy. I have devoured time and time again the ideas, thoughts, tests and code from Jeff and Steve Fulton and even being a fanboy I have a mind of my own and there are a lot of views that I don’t share. So I’m a fan I admit but I’m also an independent thinker.

And it is as a unbiased independent game developer that my advice is: BUY THE BOOK!

Why should I? – you ask. I’m not going to review it like you would probably expect a book review, a chapter by chapter analysis of it, acting like a dumb fan or a scholar on the subject. I’m not even going to rate it, I’m going to tell you why this book should be read by all game developers, especially aspiring ones: it has in it the lessons that seasoned game developers share with aspiring ones. It has that subtle juicy stuff that no programming book can give but it is written and thought like a coder would.

It is not a book for coders or a book for designers. It is a book for flash game developers. The best one I’ve read about the subject. I hope Jeff and Steve don’t mind this little quote:

Second game – what about the first game? Well, of course, you need to make your first game, but inevitably your first game will not be all that you hoped it to be. It just happens. Don’t blame yourself. You will cut features for time, get frustrated, and sometimes, not even finish. However, this is the most important thing we want you to do: finish your game, and move onto the next. It is the only way you will get better at making games. This is the second game theory.

This is the first paragraph of the book’s first chapter. This is what game developers that have a couple of games under their belts say to aspiring game developers: finish a game, as simple as it might be, finish it!

This book could be all about code (and it has a lot and very good code) it could be neverending lines of code of bad games, one after the other with no real connection, just trying to explain feature after feature of AS3. It is not, this book is about real game development, from mindset, to design, through code.

Enough independent thinking, time for the fanboy in me to write…

Go buy the book… Steve and Jeff gave the whole flash game development comunity a lot through 8bitrocket, they put a lot of effort in this masterpiece and from a game development perspective, there isn’t anything like it regarding flash or AS3. They deserve our support for all the support they gave us and it is not like you’ll be doing them a favor and buying a bad book, you will be buying the best book about flash game development.

Just noticed I really didn’t review it… but hey reviewing this is like reviewing Mona Lisa… it smiles in a misterious yet perfect way.

GO BUY THE BOOK!

GamesChart and the Mochi Version Control

Some days ago GamesChart Barry White brought to my attention a problem with Mochi’s version control system but there was a bit of a mystery around it since it only affected one of the possible implementations of GamesChart API: if it was implemented with the drag-and-drop component, it would not work, if it was added to a Flex project, it would.

Mochi’s Version Control works as a wrapper, which usually brings some issues related to accessing the stage property. I concluded that dragging and dropping the component to the stage was for sure the problem but couldn’t find a workaround to it. Has far as I could have thought, I couldn’t call the component the same way I did with a Flex SDK project.

Barry then showed me a work around that is just amazing for its simplicity. Robert Köhler (check his games here) didn’t drag the component to the stage but rather exported it as a class. In the timeline he wrote the setup code and it worked.

After a chat with Barry and Robert, it was obvious that it was the immediate access to the stage that created the problem with Mochi’s Version Control. With the Flex SDK implementation, the setup is made AFTER the stage is ready.

To make things simple for everyone, here’s a CS3 FLA showing how to do it, but the rule of thumb to use GamesChart with Flash IDE and Mochi’s Version Control is: don’t drag the component to the stage, call the setup method from the timeline or your code as long as you check if the stage is available.

All credit goes to Robert! We are just spreading the word.

Protecting your work #2 – Initial Testing

Following the first post of the series (no need to click it’s not that interesting) I did some initial testing with some SWF encapsulation and obfuscation software. Let me remind you that the exact same testing many months ago wrecked our game, by that time Tech Wars.

What I want to achieve

For any of the software tested to pass this initial test the game I chose had to run without breaking anything. As a reminder I checked the previous testing and the problems were:

1. Sound not playing
2. Actions not being called (like opening a menu or something)
3. Problems with text

Assuming no new issues would arise I would keep an eye on these three.

Software and prerequisites

I downloaded the following demos (in alphabetic order in case you are wondering):

1. Amayeta SWF Encrypt 6.0
2. DComSoft SWF Protector 2
3. Kindisoft SecureSWF 3.4

One thing I recall was trying to get help to make Tech Wars work and found myself tunning preferences and stuff like that. So I decided that I wanted nothing of that! All my effort had to be minimum. I would install the demo software on my harddrive and throw an SWF at it, check for problems, try some minor things. I wanted no complications and no tunning.

Maybe I’m being to picky, but my know-how doesn’t include encryption, not to this extent. As a game developer there is so much stuff I have to learn every week, that software like this, while extremely important is just a tool. I just want it to work with minimal fuss.

Last but not least, the chosen game was Atomik Kaos 2. I did some small testing with a build of Hajime, but I guess that’s a perfect game for later testing, right now I needed something that I knew in and out, so AK2 it was.

Amayeta SWF Encrypt 6.0

Amayeta’s SWF Encrypt Interface looks easy and fine. Choosing and protecting the file was an easy job, but my problems with dynamic textfields emerged almost instantly and the game had a slight hicup when a level was finished. Apart from that all was fine. The hicup wasn’t serious, but I had to take a look at the textfield issue.

On the left SWF Encrypt, on the right the original SWF

Took a deep breath, looked at the options before me (not many, minimalist, just the way I like it) and I had a vague idea about encrypting names being an issue. So I decided not to encrypt names… it worked perfectly. A little tiny thing, but nothing serious.

DComSoft SWF Protector 2

Next on the list DComSoft’s SWF Protector 2 and I must say I’m really impressed. The interface is just perfect and it was begging for a drag and drop of the SWF, which I did and it worked wonders. I had to do nothing, absolutely nothing, just drag the file and click a button.

It was perfect! Just like I imagined it.

Kindisoft Secure SWF 3.4

Secure SWF doesn’t need installation, that’s a big plus in my book. The interface feels old though but it does the job. I tried to drag and drop the SWF and that also did the trick, cool! Time to protect the file and run it. A couple of severe problems happened. For starters as soon as the swf opened the player threw an error. The game went fine after that until I checked the achievements screen where dynamic textfields were messed up.

Flash debugger error

Problem with textfields, again left is protected SWF, right is original SWF

I returned to secureSWF to try a different approach. One fine thing is the protection presets it offers. Being my middle name “minimal” I enjoy not having to go through all the options trying to find out what it is and what it is not. So I chose the preset “Safe – less protection but will always generate working files” but the results were exactly the same, both for the starter error and the textfield issue.

I started to look at all the options, aiming for a custom solution, but I was overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I had to try on to eventually make it work. I gave up at this point.

Conclusions

I’ll give decompilers a shot next and see what happens, what can I see, extract and so on, but for now Amayeta’s SWF Encrypt and DComSoft SWF Protector 2 did the job although I’m very impressed with SWF Protector 2 because it just did its job and I did not have to worry about anything. If I recall correctly that was what I was not able to do with Tech Wars testing. If I had to make an early pick, I’d go SWF Protector 2.

There will be a lot of news in the upcoming days, stay tunned.

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