I recently gave a talk on Flash Professional CC and CreateJS for Adobe and WebProfessionals.org. Slides and recording are up!
Recording Link: http://seminars.adobeconnect.com/p1kqnaqlwzx/
Also: What?!? Flash Professional CC will target the Dart language from Google??? Crazy talk!
I had the opportunity this month to speak at the Rocky Mountain Adobe User Group about gaming, Flash, Adobe, et cetera alongside Jun Heider who talked about Apache Flex. Here are my slides:
There have been a lot of changes with the Flash Platform over the past year or two plus a lot of changes in the web landscape in general. The role of Flash is shifting and Adobe is adapting to this shift by focusing engineering efforts, tooling, and community library support to the two areas in which Flash really excels: gaming and premium video experiences. In this session, we’ll have a look at the momentum behind Flash Gaming and see how Flash Builder 4.7, Flash Professional CS6, and Adobe Scout contribute to this momentum while taking advantage of the new Adobe Gaming SDK and the support of Stage3D libraries like Starling, Away3D, and Feathers. Interested in how to get started in game development with the Flash Platform? Don’t miss this session!
The recordings of both my talk and Jun’s Introduction to Apache Flex 4.9 can be accessed as well.
Light-weight, skinnable, and extensible UI components for mobile and desktop. Feathers puts it all together in one package — along with blazing fast GPU powered graphics (courtesy of Starling Framework) to create a smooth and responsive experience.
This is really neat – the UI component library formerly known as “Foxhole” is now called “Feathers” and is aligned the Starling Framework. The website over at http://feathersui.com/ has full documentation on usage, examples to play with, and a forum for user interaction. Pretty slick!
Looking at getting into gaming using Flash, Unity, or HTML5? Want to see some great examples of gaming using these and other tech? Want full source code for all these examples to learn from? If any of this interests you – you’ll be happy to have a look at the 1400+ games developed during Ludum Dare #24 this past weekend.
Ludum Dare (Latin: “to give a game“) is a regular accelerated game development event which takes place over 48 hours. A theme is voted on in the days following up to the event and the chosen theme is revealed at the event start time. Participants basically are going into these 48 hours with nothing prepared since the theme is secret… and all assets and code (aside from external libraries and such) must be created during those 48 hours. Anything that isn’t must be declared beforehand – making for a pretty intense experience for the participants.
This was my first Ludum Dare (although I have contemplated joining previous ones) and I really enjoyed the experience. Ever since I had the pleasure of tech editing Christer Kaitila’s ”The Game Jam Survival Guide“, I’ve been wanting to give something like this a shot.
My motivation for this round was to force familiarity with a specific ActionScript gaming engine. I wasn’t sure what I would use until the theme was announced and settled on the popular Flixel engine. I’m happy that I did – as this engine really makes everything quite simple when throwing a game together. Initially I was put off by the theme (“Evolution”), having absolutely zero ideas on where to begin, but that all worked out as I put time into developing the concept. I learned a ton about Flixel – which was my main goal. Picked up a lot of other new experiences and had fun doing it!
Some of the final game is a bit rough… I know there are some spelling errors, for instance. Some of the game logic could be fixed and there is certainly room for cleaning up the code. here could also be a bit of challenge added to the game as right now it is COMPLETELY story-driven in a minimalistic fashion. The soundtrack could also be cleaned up as well as the sprites.
I’m really happy with the way it all came together.
Tools used:
Had a great time doing this even with limitations imposed by family, clients, publishers, and the rest. I’d encourage anyone to give it a go – even if they don’t think 48 hours is enough time.
Check out my game – D’evilution!
Adobe today released both Flash Player 11.4 for desktop browsers and AIR 3.4 for both desktop and mobile operating systems. This release includes new features as well as enhancements and bug fixes related to security, stability, performance, and device compatibility for the runtimes previously code-named “Dolores” as outlined in the Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes.
Not only did Adobe announce runtimes releases today, but also some updates around tooling. Flash Professional CS6 will be getting a major update in September and the Flash Builder 4.7 beta will open up to the public next week! I’ve listed some of the updates and features below.
