LBGBlog

From Gizmodo, some great news for us developers creating Flash-Lite games.

Kind of good news coming out of the Library of Congress regarding our digital rights, especially relating to our cellphone use. Copyright laws were amended to allow customers to unlock the software on their cellphones so they can take their phones with them from wireless carrier to wireless carrier. (The ruling is also good for independent software developers who want to develop software for cellphones without having to go through the corporate red tape.) Also in the ruling is the permission for educators to use snippets of movies for educational purposes and for blind people to use special software to read copy-protected e-books.

Several things come to mind with this ruling. Firstly, I'd like to thank the government for giving us small pieces of fair use once again. (Of course, the implicit indication is that now all other forms of fair use are illegal and can only be made legal by the granting of more exceptions. Oh DMCA, how we love thee.) It's also nice to see that blind people need to get special permission to use something that they've purchased. Secondly, how many people are going to claim to be educators know (sp) when they rip and snip DVDs? Laws are fun to sidestep. – Nicholas Deleon

I noticed that very few, if any, people from the Director Developer community went to MAX 2006. Having just returned, I can see why the appeal would be low for Director Developers. I'm also glad that we started our transition to Flash several years ago.

First, at the conference there was no mention of Director, anywhere. I know this is old news, but the key here is that Adobe is integrating Photoshop and Illustrator into Flash and Flex to make it much easier for designers to work with programmers. The new PSD importer for Flash will let you assign values to layers in the PSD that get carried over. Text can be kept live, and filters can be translated from PSD to Flash filters... That by itself will save loads of time.

Also, a brandy new tool is coming out called Apollo. It allows you to take web applications, like Flash and Flex, and even html, that have strong data back ends, and turn them into standalone apps. Nearly standalone (requires the Apollo). Includes filesystem integration, and ways to handle online and offline usage, so basically, people can roll their own versions of every Microsoft Office product, customized for their workflows, and completely secure. And fast as heck. What does Director do that this can't. I really don't know. I have to think it over. I'm not saying that Director doesn't have advantages over this, I'm saying that the water is a little muddy, so the distinctions are unclear.

Actionscript 3.0 is a speed demon. 10 times the execution speed as before, in most cases. Lingo may be faster, but Flash is so much better suited to multiple developer projects, and code reuse, and with CPU speeds through the roof, that distinction is lost.

Also, some new ways of handling components and memory are really looking strong. They showed a list tool that was linked to a data source. Then they populated the list with a million records manually, all the while scrolling the list. No lag. Then they purged the array, the list updated, and the system memory was returned in about 2 seconds. Data collection is much improved, and
fast.

3D inside PDFs is much stronger than previously thought. Sure, it's just a PDF... But one of the last demos they showed was a Flash file embedded inside a PDF sending commands to an overlapping 3D file. Not just commands, but mapping images onto the 3D object, and responding to interaction with the 3D object. Click a button on the 3D object, and the Flash in front, and behind, responded. Given that level of interaction, it can only be assumed that embedding 3D into Flash is not very far off. Probably handled like imported video formats, with Class-like properties and functions providing access to some or all of the 3D object.

If 3D is going into Flash, I want to start working out that workflow now. If PDF is required as a bridge, then it should be possible to make a single page PDF. Not ideal, but at least the 3D engine was written this century.

Loads of new features going into the main workhorses of the Adobe lineup. The links between the tools are really fantastic, too. We don't do much HTML work here, but I can see quite a bit of web application work coming from getting to know these tools better. Even some games.

I managed to have a few quick talks with some of the high up figures at Adobe. Nobody said anything specific, but I could tell that they approved of my decision to take up Flash development, and there were no hints of anything on the horizon for Director.

I tried to keep my comments un-flame-worthy, and top level enough so I'm not handing out trade secrets... Nothing above was intended to spark any firestorms, and I'd like to be available for any questions about the show. As far as I could tell, I was the only person there who even talked about Director.

Andrew Keplinger
Left Brain Games, Inc.

More interesting news out there. We already knew this, but this does help to back up our value, and the value of ths business that Left Brain Games, Inc. is in.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Scientists call it the next great discovery, a way to captivate students so much they will spend hours learning on their own.

It's the new vision of video games.

The Federation of American Scientists -- which typically weighs in on matters of nuclear weaponry and government secrecy -- declared Tuesday that video games can redefine education.

Capping a year of study, the group called for federal research into how the addictive pizazz of video games can be converted into serious learning tools for schools.

Just caught this story, and it fits with many trends that we have noticed online.

+-----------------------------------------------------
| 64% of Online Gamers Are Female
| from the good-news-everyone dept.
| posted by Zonk on Sunday October 08, @04:35 (Games)
| http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/08/0758214
+-----------------------------------------------------

According to a report discussed on 1up, a new study by the Nielsen folks
finds that [0]more than half of the 117 Million U.S. online gamers are
women. From the article: "The study's announcement release doesn't break
down what games they're playing, though we expect sites like pogo.com,
which feature a multitude of Flash-based games are rather high on the
list. Even more surprising is how many older gamers are playing. While
the teenage market dominates in numbers, the study says more than 15
million gamers, about 8%, are actually at least 45 years old."

Part of my daily routine includes reading. A fair amount of reading.

I browse news headlines, see what friends are up to and, of course, I scour tech sites and blogs.

Today I came across a white paper on game development and the proposed use of Flash. I seem to remember having scoured it before and, while it’s a bit out of date (apparently written durring the Flash 8 beta), today I thought to comment a bit on it as the article raises a few excellent points.

The article, What About Flash? Can We Really Make Games With It?, by Scott Bilas from Oberon Media can be found in its entirety here.

We’ve heard this story before: big-game developer gets tired of big-game team size, pressure, and politics, and switches to making small games. New companies filled with people escaping the retail AAA industry, developing these “casual” games, are popping up all the time. These aren’t the silly little things that get forwarded to us in email and hold our attention for 30 seconds. These are games that make money, and hearken back to the days of yore when a couple geeks in a garage could put together a hot shareware title in a few months and get rich quick. The big difference today is in the tools. We can build bigger, better, prettier, more advanced games with fewer people in less time and for less money than ever before!

One of the most respected (and reviled) tools for making interactive content is Flash. Well, what about Flash as a game development platform? It has grown in power considerably over the years. The casual games we build today are equivalent in production quality to the AAA games that were shipping around 10 years ago. Can we do it in Flash instead? And why would we want to?

Reviled seems a bit strong of a term, but I'll let it slide. Bilas asks a question, though: Cay you and Should you utilize Flash for game development. Before tackling that question, though, one should describe a bit just what type of game we're talking about.

The target audience for the article is developers of the niche market "casual games." Bilas offers a description, and according to him a casual game…

…is between 3 and 10 megabytes in size (56K modem users usually won’t be able or willing to download anything bigger).
…sells for around $20 in the impulse buy zone. About the same as a CD, or a cheap date.
…works on ancient computers with equally ancient operating systems.
…is exclusively distributed online through channels like MSN or RealArcade.
…has a vastly different audience than retail PC/console games.
…is developed for a fraction of the price and resources as a big retail game.

Also, casual games will frequently have a web-hosted “teaser” that players can play forever for free, with a more full-featured “deluxe” version that is downloadable. The deluxe version is almost always copy protected by the distribution channels, and limited in some way until purchased (often a simple 60 minute timeout). And in many cases, the old shareware model still works, nagging the user with guilt screens to pay.

Furthermore he breaks down – in fairly technical terms – just what Flash is. If you are thinking a casual game (or advergame) is in your company’s future and you’re not sure just what you need (or what we offer), reading this break-down of the tools can be a good place for you to start. For the most part the toolset that Bilas lists are the same that we specialize in here at Left Brain Games.

Another bonus is his compare/contrast on other development formats out there including SVG and XAML and their limitations when compared to Flash.

His list of the advantages to Flash development are quite well thought out, too:

Advantages of Flash
• A great authoring tool for interactive content. Integrates most features needed for making a game.
• Flash is everywhere. For the web version of a game, 96% of the audience won’t need to download anything except the game. More importantly, many people won’t be able to install arbitrary ActiveX controls, or use a Java plugin, whereas Flash is preinstalled with Windows on corporate machines.
• Near trivial porting to Macintosh. Open up another 5% of the market to an audience desperate for decent games.
• Easy conversion from a full game to a web version, or if going the other way, a natural path to take from web version to full downloadable game.
• Cost is essentially free – there is a small cost for the Flash IDE, but it’s nearly free to distribute (just some minor licensing things to worry about that don’t cost anything). Royalty-free licenses for decoders such as MP3 and Sorensen Spark are included.
• Ease of finding artists. There is a huge talent pool to draw from for creating art or animations for Flash, either on staff or contract.
• Embed your game in PowerPoint when giving a GDC presentation!
• A gigantic community and secondary market. There are thousands of Flash related web sites with tutorials, articles, and discussions. There are hundreds of Flash add-ons or components for sale.
• Easy copy-paste to test things out. Flash permits drag-and-drop or copy-paste from one FLA to another, and it automatically brings along any dependent objects into the new library. This can make it incredibly easy to try out quick ideas outside of the main game, and is the one case where it’s worth using the debugger.

The main advantage of using Flash, though, is that it’s simply well-suited to the task of making games. An entire gameplay mechanic can be prototyped in a few hours, with decent art, in an easily packaged form that runs on a PC, Mac, or Linux, through a web browser or standalone...royalty-free. If we want to scale up to larger games, i.e. go from prototype into downloadable casual games, then there are some tricks to use to make it work, but nothing too awful.

Furthermore:

What’s different about developing for Flash than a roll-our-own engine? For artists, it’s about the same. Make art in Photoshop and check it into source control – Flash can import a variety of formats, including PSD. For audio, hand off MP3’s to Flash, or give it WAV’s and let Flash do the compression itself. Of course, Flash is much more flexible in that it’s easy to find artists with Flash animation experience for contract or full time work. We can simply have them make SWF’s and integrate that directly into the game via loadMovie() or dragging and dropping the SWF onto the stage or into a symbol. Or they can edit our FLA’s directly, if they’re careful. Audio engineers can do the same thing, if sequencing audio into animations.

The real difference with using Flash comes with assembling the game – the work our content engineers will do.

Flash is a great and powerful tool when it comes to the development process. The turnaround time for development is orders of magnitude faster than traditional programming platforms as well as Java. It fully supports the use of external classes (.as ActionScript files) allowing us to incorporate version control systems and spread development over multiple developers. All forms of media are supported (jpg, png, gif, wav, mp3, mov, and the Flash-native video format flv). We can also natively utilize external XML files allowing all forms of data to be stored remotely and easily updated for immediate changes in the end user’s runtime experience.

What type of grade does Oberon give Flash?

• The executable code must be small. The Oberon host application plus Flash’s OCX adds up to about 1.1 megs, compressing down to 829K. Not great, but not bad, considering all the toys in there. Grade: B.

• The content must be small. Flash supports JPG and MP3, and its bytecode is tight enough to be negligible in comparison to the bitmaps and audio. We’re good to go. Our Oberon Flash host application adds support for JPEG2000, OGG, and OXM (Ogg-compressed .xm format), all of which are even smaller. Grade: A.

• We’ve got to grab players’ attention. Flash is an excellent animation tool. With the right talent we can really grab people, although we need to be very careful about doing large full screen effects. Grade: B+.

• The engine needs to avoid fancy API’s that probably don’t exist on the client machines. Flash runs on a default install of Win95, so it’s up to the host application to limit its API use, which isn’t difficult. Grade: A.

• Performance is a huge concern. This is the worst problem with Flash, and it gets a C here. Although while we can’t bet on Flash 8’s release date, it looks like we may be able to bump this up to a B in a few months.

• The toolset needs to support rapid iteration. This is perhaps the most powerful ability Flash gives us. Grade: A+.

• We’re going to want to make a web version of the game as a teaser. The route to a web game from a deluxe game (or the other way around) is clear and direct in Flash. Grade: A.

The lowest grade scored to Flash is a C for performance. I would say a lot of those issues have been addressed and — at the very least — improved upon. The inclusion of bitmap caching in Flash 8 alone should beat their C grade into a high B. Not a low A, though. Not yet. There are still some performace problems at larger resolutions (c. 800x600).

In the article he touches upon the use of external extension software (wrapper applications) for extending Flash's capabilities. I'm not certain if MDM Zinc was available at press time, but the latest version of Zinc (more so than SWFStudio, in my opinion) offers up extremely powerful extensibility to Flash and has the benefit of being cross-platform (non-Intel Macs).