Friday, November 18, 2011

Blog Update

Really quick post - updated the look of the blog (as you can obviously see.) I've also put in some links across the top bar, you can now visit the youtube channel directly if you want to watch a series of movies one after the other, and I've also made another page which has each of the tutorials listed, incase you wanted to watch a specific tutorial again.

Cheers,

David

Nape and Flash Develop - Tutorial 2: Sprites!

Hey guys,

Here's the second part in the series of tutorials I'm running on Nape physics engine, this tutorial goes over sprites and how to get them into your game!



Let me know what you all think and as I say at the end of this movie, part three is going to deal with joints and moving objects with the mouse!

Thanks guys,

David

Box2D and Flash Develop - Tutorial 2: Sprites

Hey guys, here's the second part in my Box2D tutorial series, it's fairly short, but goes over the important method of how to give physics bodies a physical representation!




As always if you go to my youtube page you'll get the link to the github repo to download source code if you're lazy and don't want to type it out yourself! :P As I say in the movie, part three will be out soon enough with how to do joints! Thanks guys! David

PxlSmshBox2D

Hey guys, here's a video that I've been wanting to post up for quite some time about Pixel Smash, a funky little thing developed by the guys over at Photon Storm, basically it couples pixel art with the ability to back it with physics. Makes for some really cool effects etc. I've taken some time to develop out the code into Box2D and have put it onto my GitHub account here.

I hinted that I was going to write a video about this last time and here it is:




I'm working on pulling down the amount of "uuuuums" and "aaaaahs" that I say, but bear with me, I'm not used to recording what I do :).

I'm going to be working on this project till I figure out it's either impossible or what's wrong with it, I'm hoping I come across the latter, and am able to produce a fully working version for you all.

Thanks heaps!

David.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Musings of a occupational nature.

Hey team,

Just wanted to post up a little bit of info on why there's been a massive gap in-between posts (again.) Well, to put it plainly, daddy needs a job, or I can't buy nice things. As I'm sure some of you have dealt with first hand - the games industry within Australia is very very very small, and getting smaller by the day. And subsequently, the skillset that one possesses in order to become a successful applicant of the games studios left in Melbourne is getting bigger and bigger, almost beyond what one person can learn and demonstrate with no proir experience within the industry.

This poses a Catch 22 problem (my favorite,) one is unable to obtain a job as one doesn't have experience within the industry, and yet, the only jobs that are obtainable to gain said experience, themselves request that experience within the industry be had as a requisite for applying.

As such, it's come to my attention that the games industry, by and large is NOT the way that any young programmer / designer / smart guy should look. And that's not to say that any readers should be perturbed from reading further, don't lose faith just yet. I haven't finished. As I said - the issue is that to earn a LIVING off of creating computer games, is next to impossible. And for myself, that's certainly something that's very hard to let go of, from day one of Uni I've thought of working in a team of professionals creating the next big game, and in reality, it's just not happening any more. So - where do you go from here? I'm putting games to the back of my mind, into the drawer marked "one day, but not today." Because I know that there are a lot of good ideas swimming around out there, in the ether, and certainly many in my own head. But in the mean time, I need to focus in on what is important, and that's getting a job.

As a consequence (I say that, but it's not really,) I'm going to be pushing out a new Flash program which I'm yet to name. The purpose of the program is to allow mobile app developers that have selected the Flash environment to monetize their app. There are a huge number of mobile networks to chose from - InMobi, AdMob, Millennial Media, Tapjoy, JumpTap, Inner-Active - the list goes on and on and on and on. What I intend to create is a method by which, a user can simple enter in which network their app is to choose and then issue a simple call which will display the ad at a given location.

I will be developing this as an open source project and would love for anyone that thinks they have something important to input to take part. This will be the first step, developing this "Network Selector." Where I plan to go with it? Well, suffice to say, Australia is yet to have a fully Developed Mobile Network, and it's a very lucrative and economically advantageous thing to take part in.

Stay tuned.

David.

P.S. I won't stop with my physics engine tutorials, I started them and intend to continue, if you have a good idea for a tutorial, email me!