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Tag: flash (page 4 of 5)

Help Get Everything to Everyone

22.06.2010 / / 0 Comments

Everything, By Everyone may sound like the most vaguely titled movie since Stephen King’s “IT” and perhaps it is. But it happens to be aptly named.

In 2006 Newgrounds, the web’s oldest and arguably most popular Flash portal, changed its slogan from “The Problems of the Future, Today!” to “Everything, By Everyone”. On the surface the change was an attempt to distance Newgrounds from its reputation of being a haven for negativity, teenage angst and childish toilet humor. But in reality, Newgrounds was updating its slogan to reflect what it had grown into; a collection of talented and passionate artists and programmers sharing their work with the world. Newgrounders were creating games, cartoons, music, art and a thriving community around all of it. They were, and still are, creating everything, by everyone.

Nathan Kuruna, a filmmaker and fellow Pennsylvanian, is working on a documentary that will tell Newgrounds’ story. Besides that he’s telling a story about the evolution of online entertainment, of user generated content and how the web (and Flash) have changed the way we get, make and perceive entertainment.

I had a chance to sit down with Nathan last August to talk with him about Newgrounds, Flash, and where I think they’re going. He shared with me what he’d learned in his other interviews and also what he hopes to accomplish with his film. I promise you this is a film that will not disappoint. Not only that, it will turn some heads in the process.

We’re so used to the web as it exists today that it’s hard to remember what it was like before Newgrounds, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging. In roughly a decade, the web has gone from being primarily about content consumption into a forum for self expression. User generated content has undoubtedly changed the web, but its reach extends far beyond the browser. In November of 2004, Tom Fulp and Dan Paladin leapt off the pages of Newgrounds onto the XBOX with Alien Homid, the first Flash game to cross over to a console. Edmund McMillen, another prolific Newgrounder, brought us Gish (which is now open source, by the way) and is now readying the debut of his first console game, Super Meat Boy. Meanwhile, Bo Burnham is writing a musical for Judd Apatow and Brain Waterman is making a movie with the Leslie Nielson (yes, that guy from the Naked Gun movies). User generated content has given creative minds who would have otherwise gone unnoticed a chance to compete with traditional media outlets.

Nathan’s movie is about how this transformation came about and Newgrounds’ role in all of it. Appropriately so, he’s found his way onto Kickstarter to help get his project across the finish line. He’s shot a ton of video but he’s got hundreds of hours left to sift through, editing to do, more interviews to travel to, dvds to press, festivals to enter and lives to change. OK, that last part might have been an overstatement but we’ll never know if Nathan doesn’t get a chance to make his movie, so please consider throwing him a few bucks. He’s a hell of a nice guy and I can tell you first hand that he believes in this film and has a passion for its message. Hell, his movie may end up being proof of its own message. It’s a story worth telling and we’ll all benefit from having it told.

For more information, head over to the Everything, By Everyone website. If you’re already sold, click here to help him out. And if you can’t donate, that’s cool but do Nathan a favor and click one of the share buttons below or put his Kickstarter widget on your website or blog.

People are often inspired by others’ generosity, so if you find yourself reaching into your pocket to help out, leave us a comment and maybe you’ll incite a few others to follow your generous lead.

Interview with Flash’s Co-Creator, Jonathan Gay

18.05.2010 / / 0 Comments

Aaron Simpson and I recently had an opportunity to sit down with Jonathan Gay, co-creator of Flash, to talk to him about what’s been going on with Apple and Adobe these days. OK, so we didn’t actually get to sit down with him, we emailed him questions, but we were seated while we were writing them. Shut up. I’m sorry, let’s never fight again.

Anyway, as a long time Flash enthusiast and recent Mac convert (I do love my iPhone) this has been a topic of great interest to me. So I was very excited when Aaron asked me to help him come up with some questions for Jon.

I will keep this brief because there’s a lot of meat to the interview, though I would like to say this: With Jonathan free from direct involvement in either Adobe or Apple, we knew he would be able to speak openly about the driving forces behind and the implications of Apple’s exclusion of Flash and commitment to HTML5. He brings some thoughts to this discussion that I haven’t yet heard from either side and though there are moments when you’ll wonder if he’s playing favorites (after all Flash is near and dear to his heart) I found his responses to be well thought out, honest and fair.

Before I send you off to the interview I have to thank Jonathan Gay for taking time to indulge our curiosities and to Aaron Simpson for asking me to work with him on this. Discussion is a good thing and I hope Jonathan’s thoughts can help keep it going.

Hop on over to Cold Hard Flash to read the interview with Jonathan Gay, which covers Apple, Adobe Flash and the dwindling population of the Giant Panda. Note: Interview’s panda bear content may be lower than advertised.

Learn How to Make Flash Games

29.04.2010 / / 1 Comment

If you’re looking to learn how to make a Flash game, Adam ‘Atomic’ Saltsman and Chevy Ray Johnston are coming to your rescue. They’ve recently launched a joint venture, Flash Game Dojo, which is a site dedicated to helping ease people into the world of creating Flash games. Their site aims to answer questions like “How do I add gravity to an object?”, “How do I get keyboard input?” and “Who shot Mr. Burns?”. OK, I made that last one up, plus we all know that it was Maggie. Anyway… Granted the information they’re providing is specific to using their respective frameworks, but a lot of the key concepts and programming models you’ll learn working with Flixel and FlashPunk are still relevant when building a game completely from scratch. And they’re open source frameworks, so if you’re uncomfortable using formulas without deriving them first (remember high school math?), you can open up the guts and see what’s going on under the hood of something as eerily simple as this:

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// adding gravity to the player
var player:FlxSprite = new FlxSprite();
player.acceleration.y = 600;

What’s really neat about what Adam and Chevy are doing is that they’re aiming to usher people into the world of creating games. They’re NOT trying to push their respective frameworks, which as products in a marketplace would be competitors. Instead they’ve chosen to offer their work up as free open source options, a space in which they can support each other rather than compete. They’re working together toward a common goal: Get people making great games. I applaud them for that.

I have an upcoming series of articles entitled “Actionscript for Artists” which will focus on providing tools to help artists and programmers work more easily together to make games. It’ll be a mix of code samples, tutorials aimed at teaching artists the basics of Actionscript and tips on how to communicate and collaborate. I come from a more traditional Flash gaming background that uses vector art, movieClips and other techniques more native to Flash, so my focus will be on that style of Flash game development. Flixel and FlashPunk are Flash frameworks that turn Flash into an environment similar to the way old NES games were built, using sprite sheets and raster images. Though our approaches to Flash game development are different, we’re all trying to do the same thing: get people making great games. And besides, variety is a good thing. I’ve only dabbled in Flixel and though it’s a very foreign approach for me (I’m used to building everything on my own, so adhering to a framework is tough for me to get used to) I intend to learn Flixel and FlashPunk. I don’t think I’ll ever abandon the way I’ve always made Flash games, but I do like to try new things, evolve and add new things to my bag of tricks.

Flash Dojo offers a bunch of handy services:

  • A wiki with documentation on both frameworks
  • Q&A style explanations for how to build common game elements
  • Free swf hosting for people who want to quickly test and share a game… likely to be used by people who want to share a work in progress that isn’t ready to go on Newgrounds. You upload a swf and the site gives you a link to share it. It’s that simple. I’ve got webspace coming out of my ears but this is so simple I will undoubtedly use it from time to tim.
  • Articles about game design
  • Software recommendations
  • Tutorials
  • Completed game source for your learning/tinkering pleasure
  • And the bulk of their site’s updates are broadcast via RSS so you can stay abreast of what’s new

If you’re interested in game design I strongly recommend you comb through Flash Game Dojo. Spend some time playing with their frameworks, see what they can do and how they work. But remember that Adam and Chevy don’t have all the answers and they haven’t thought of everything. They will be the first to tell you that their framworks aren’t the ways to build games, they’re just two ways to build games. Learn from what they’ve done, add your own flair and if you think you have found a better way to do something you may well have. I’m sure Adam and Chevy are interested in being the starting point from which people can learn how to make games. What they’re probably NOT interested in is creating a legion of game designers who rely so heavily on Flixel or FlashPunk that the frameworks speak louder than the game experiences created with them. The idea is for people to play your game and remark, “That’s a great game!”, rather than “That’s a great Flixel game!”.

Create. Learn. Play. Question. Invent. Share.

Adam is known for games such as Gravity Hook and Canabalt which he built using the Flixel Framework, for which he is also responsible. Chevy Ray Johnston is behind Flash Punk, another Flash game framework. Both frameworks are designed to handle a lot of the heavy lifting, collision detections, ui, asset management, etc., so that you can focus on game design.

Flash Gaming Summit Video Archives

09.03.2010 / / 0 Comments

If you didn’t have a chance to watch the live streams yesterday, all the presentations have been archived and are now available for you to watch at your leisure. Mochi posted a list here. The presentations are broken down chronologically by room.

The Robertson Room focused mainly on the business side, with presentations about how to market and monetize games. The Fisher Room was more development oriented, hosting talks from Adam Saltsman on Canabalt, Nitrome on their growth from a 2 man operation to what they are today and also from Sean Cooper who shared some of his techniques for handling tons of calculations per second without bringing Flash to its knees. I sat in on an even number from each because I walk the line between game developer and game producer; both topics are of interest to me.

I don’t want to summarize because you really should just go check out whichever you think would be relevant to you, though I will say that I particularly enjoyed the panel entitled Everything About Sponsorship & Licensing from the business side and Sean Cooper’s talk from the developer’s perspective. Sadly I didn’t get up early enough to catch Adam Saltsman but you can be sure I’ll be checking out that archive before long.

There were quite a few great quotes I could pull from the Summit but I particularly enjoyed these 2, which came almost back to back from the panel on Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship. The first was from William Stallwood of Cipher Prime. When asked (and I’m paraphrasing the question because it was worded poorly) what he hoped would be the future of the Flash game industry, he responded

[51:05] I kinda want to see Flash games not be called Flash games anymore….when somebody says Flash games I want to call it a game…If I had my personal way every person who called a Flash game a ‘Flash Game’ I’d slap them in the face and they’d call it a game for the rest of their life and we could all not have to worry about disguising our games…

Though also poorly worded (it’s ok, these guys were put on the spot) his message was clear: Flash games unfortunately carry a negative stigma. This is probably due to the fact that getting into making Flash games has such a low startup cost. Flash is an affordable tool readily available to the masses. Couple that with sites like Newgrounds, Kongregate and other automated game portals and the average internet patron will find themselves wading through 20 shitty Flash games before they find 1 good one. It’s simple numbers. It’s easy to get into so everyone does which floods the market with sub-par games. Yes bad console games exist, but if you look through your collection you’ll find a better ratio than 20:1. Flash is an easy entry point into programming, game portals are available for instant feedback and as a result a community of basement game developers was born…many of whom will go on to create amazing games on their own or find jobs in the industry (me, for one). This is a great thing from the perspective of game developers and for the game development community as a whole. With new programmers being born every day, the community grows, Adobe starts listening and we can as a community begin to shape the tools we use, help Actionscript evolve into what we want it to do and events like the Flash Gaming Summit can take place. And with attention on the Flash community, sponsorship and ad dollars become viable options for the very people who built the community in the first place.

The downside is that Joe Internet doesn’t know the difference between the dabblers, the new comers, the student drivers and the seasoned and dedicated Flash game developers. They all get lumped under one heading: Flash Games. The community doesn’t deserve to bear the burden of its low startup cost, especially when it’s that startup cost that fostered the growth of the community in the first place. Stallwood’s comment speaks to this point. It would be great if we could get to where the platform is inconsequential. Who cares if it’s a Flash game? A game is a game. Whether tacking Flash to the beginning of a game carries a negative connotation (which at present it can) or a positive connotation (which it probably never will), the platform shouldn’t prejudge the content itself. Ten years ago, in the mind of the average internet goer, Flash was practically synonymous with “annoying banner ads”. I feel confident that association has been replaced with “those casual games you play on that game site”, which is a step in the right direction. Hopefully the next evolution will disassociate the platform from the experience all together. Fun is fun. End of story.

The other comment I really enjoyed came from Colin Northway of Fantastic Contraption who when asked if the trials of being a “true indie developer” were worth the effort, besides responding that indeed it was he added:

[53:25] Having an incredibly boring job is a fantastic way to make a very good game.

This is something I’ve wrestled with on and off throughout my career. There are times when I want to quit my job, go live in a one bedroom apartment somewhere and just make games. Unfortunately, most of us need variety in our lives. All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. If you get a job doing what you love you might never find time to do more of what you love when you go home at night. The converse, which Northway points out, is that if you don’t up and quit your job and give the indie life a go it’s very likely that the monotony of your “day job” will keep you excited and motivated to go home and bang away on that passion project. It was short and sweet, but it speaks volumes.

There’s a lot of great stuff in these archives, so spend some time and pick out a few that would be meaningful to you. And if you’re looking to be inspired, definitely take some time to hear Nitrome’s story.

Flash Gaming Summit 2010

08.03.2010 / / 0 Comments

The Flash Gaming Summit is going on today in San Francisco today and even if you weren’t lucky enough to be able to attend, you can still get in on the action. They have setup streaming webcams in both presentation rooms so that you can view them from afar!

Robertson Room Streaming:
http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/flashgamingsummit/
Fisher Room Streaming:
http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/flashgamingsummit2/

If you’d like to know what/when will be going on, check out the Flash Gamin Summit 2010 Program. Some of the highlights, in my humble opinion, will be presentations from Adam “Atomic” Saltsman (of Canabalt and Flixel fame), Nitrome and Sean Cooper (most recently known for the Boxhead games), but there’s nothing on the bill that I wouldn’t be interested to follow. Hopefully they’ll be archiving these feeds and making them available online later, but there’s no guarantee so if you’ve got some time today drop in and check it out.

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Sean James McKenzie

I have been inventing games all my life, of the video variety since 2002. No delusions of grandeur, I just want to make things people will enjoy and earn the respect of my peers. #indiedev #gamedev #creativity

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