Casually Hardcore devlog

Archive for May 30th, 2007

Scaleform – Flash-based UI for 3D accelerated games

Through work, I got an evaluation copy of ScaleForm’s Flash-based UI SDK. Unlike business apps, where UIs can be static, games invariably have animating menus, windows, and buttons. Flash is perfect for this. The other option is HTML with animated gifs, but HTML rendering in games is a fairly new thing(see Gecko and WebKit) and won’t be mainstream for a year or two.

And compared to all UI SDKs for games I’ve worked with this is by far the slickest and probably most useful. There have been technically more advanced UI SDKs, but the real power is in leveraging Flash as the UI creation tool for games because traditionally creating UIs have meant editing textual layout files by hand.

I harp on this to game development newbies: tools, tools, tools. There are hundreds of 3D engines out there, but few can rival Unreal, Source, OGRE, Gamembryo because of their tools. The power is getting art assets into a game engine quickly… and most engines can not do that and require manual processes which are buggy and human error prone.

Add comment May 30th, 2007

When someone else makes a game you’d thought you’d make first…

How does it make you feel?

It happens all the time. With me – “Boom Boom Rocket” – was the most recent example. Although, I didn’t think it had any commercial appeal beyond the DDR junkies and my version would be 100% “Artsy-fartsy.”

Yesterday, I discovered another game I thought I’d write first: mygamebuilder.com

Mygamebuilder.com

It’s a Flex/Flash 9 based game where the player makes a tile-based web game and others can play it. Brilliant idea! Everything is hosted on the webserver so anybody anywhere can access your game. Brilliant, I say! Even the company name, Jolly Good Ideas, is brilliant.

Here’s hoping the game is success, because we’re all short on fun ideas.

1 comment May 30th, 2007