November 13th, 2008
As if MAX isn’t going to be busy enough this year, I’ve just noticed that in addition to all of the regular sessions scheduled, there are a few other Flash Lite/mobile gaming-related events happening that might be worth a look:
- On Monday night there’s a birds-of-a-feather (scroll down to see the BOF schedule) session entitled, The Game Industry: Serious Games, Simulations and 3D Worlds, Casual Games, and Mobile Content. This is taking place from 8:30 to 9:30 in room 2006, Moscone West.
- As part of FITC‘s Unconference, there will be a session on Flash Lite’s future in an iPhone Dominated Landscape. The session is at 12:00 on Wednesday the 19th, and I think the Unconferences are happening on Level 2 of Moscone West, but don’t take my word on that. This is billed as a panel session (scroll down the page to read the description), but no word on who the panelists will be.
- Also part of FITC’s Unconference and not specific to Flash Lite but more on mobile gaming is a session on Monday the 17th entitled, Flash Developers Guide to building iPhone Applications. Looks like it’s a walk through the iPhone SDK and an intro to Objective-C (warm up your square brackets keys!), and how to approach iPhone dev from a Flash perspective. (Personally, I’m starting to think the easiest way is to plunk down the money for Unity and its iPhone plug-in and write a lot of JavaScript, but I could be wrong).
Unforunately, the session in which I’m speaking runs on each of the three days of the conference, and happens to be at the same time as the FITC Unconference sessions, so I’ll have to miss them both. I am curious as to who is speaking at that Flash Lite session, though.
Posted in Flash Lite (general), Game Development, MAX, iPhone | No Comments »
September 15th, 2008
On Wednesday, October 8th I’m going to be giving a short presentation to the Winnipeg chapter of the International Game Developers Association. I’m going to talk about Poker Solitaire specifically and more generally about current challenges and opportunities in mobile development.
The meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 8th, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., at the Fortune Cat Game Studios (2nd Floor – 62 Albert St.). There is no charge for admission and attendance is open to the game development and larger New Media communities (You don’t need to be an IGDA member to attend). Refreshments will also be available. Hope to see you there!
Posted in Game Development, Poker Solitaire | No Comments »
August 30th, 2007
It looks like the next Game Developers Conference in San Francisco will have even more mobile content than it has in past years. The Independent Games Festival, which is held at the GDC, has announced a new IGF Mobile competition. More information is available at the IGF Mobile site. This looks like it will be a great complement to GDC Mobile.
Since the IGF Mobile pavillion will be open from the Wednesday to the Friday of the conference, and GDC Mobile is Monday/Tuesday, it also might mean a slightly longer stay in San Francisco; not a bad thing for a Winnipegger to have to do in the middle of February!
Posted in GDC Mobile, Game Development | No Comments »
April 16th, 2007
Revision control is like backing up your files – one of those things that most people know they should be doing, but only give it some serious thought once it’s too late. If you want something that’s quick, painless, and a snap to install and implement, give FileHamster a look. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and am quite pleased with it so far.
FileHamster runs in the background, and is almost completely transparent; you’ll barely even notice that it’s doing its work. Simply tell it to watch a particular file or directory, then get to work. When you save a file, FileHamster will automatically create a revision for you. A small window will pop up briefly (just above the clock in the taskbar) to notify you. You can click a button on that window to add a note to that revision, so you can keep track of changes, or just ignore it and continue working.
Another nice feature is that you can tell FileHamster to ignore specific files or to only create a revision after a specific amount of time. This is a nice feature if, like me, you’re in the habit of hitting ctrl-s to save your work in Flash before testing the movie. That ctrl-s/ctrl-enter combination can get pressed four or five times inside of ten minutes when I’m making little tweaks, and it’s nice to know that I’m not clogging up my hard drive with unneeded revisions. You can also tell the program to not create revisions for specific files (no need to have revisions of your swf if you don’t want them).
FileHamster isn’t ideal if you’re working in a multi-person shop or are working with remote designers/developers; in that kind of situation, setting up a subversion server would give you a lot of helpful features. But if you’re a solo developer, give FileHamster a try.
Posted in Game Development, Workflow | No Comments »
March 20th, 2007
Just wanted to post some screen shots featuring the new look of the graphics for Knight’s Puzzle; the graphics are all done in vectors now, which means they look a lot sharper on the different devices on which KP will ultimately be available, although it has introduced some memory usage headaches!
Posted in Game Development, Knight's Puzzle | No Comments »
February 28th, 2007
This is slightly old news, but still interesting: a Nokia gaming habits survey. Perhaps the most interesting stat is that the average length of a mobile gaming session is 28 minutes. Although it’s not clear from the news release, it’s probably reasonable to assume that a ‘session’ could be either playing a single game or multiple different games. Either way, I think this has some interesting implications for developing Flash Lite games.
I think there’s a general conception ‘out there’ that games built with Flash Lite are or should be the gaming equivalent of snack food: quick and easy to produce, cheap, and just as quick and easy to consume. Flash Lite enables rapid development – it’s possible to put together a working prototype of a game in an incredibly short period of time (also, have you seen the code for the ‘hello world’ example program in the J2ME dev kit?) – so Flash would be the obvious choice for the snack food style of game. But also, there is a recognized and legitimate need to fill that snack food void. There is a definite market for the two- or three-minute quick hit game, such as those available through Shockwave Minis.
But there’s no reason why Flash Lite games have to be snack food; they can just as easily be a sit-down dinner. I think this study can help developers make the case that there is lots of room in the market for the longer, more compelling gaming experiences, and as Flash Lite 2.0 starts appearing on devices, it’s that much easier to imagine creating those experiences with Flash Lite.
The other element from the news release that leaped out at me was the finding that 62% of mobile gamers want to share game demos with their friends, and 79% would try out a game sent to them by their friends. So if you go the demo route, there’s an obvious benefit to including in it some way of letting people notify their friends about your demo, or letting them send the demo to their friends.
Update: Wired has a section on “instant entertainment” – entertainment as snack food. – including a short description of a few Wii “microgames“.
Posted in Flash Lite 2.0, Game Development | No Comments »
February 23rd, 2007
I’m going to GDC Mobile in San Francisco this year, and it looks to be an interesting conference! There are a number of really interesting sessions, and Flash Lite is getting its due with a couple of sessions: Flash Enabled Content: Its Future & Impact on the Industry, and Flash Lite in Gaming – What’s the Opportunity?.
Unfortunately I won’t be able to stay for the full GDC this year, but I’m looking forward to meeting some people that I’ve only talked to over the phone or Skype so far. I’ll be good to put faces to names! If you’re going to GDC Mobile and want to meet up and talk Flash Lite, drop me an email!
Posted in GDC Mobile, Game Development | No Comments »