Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
Probably old news but I’ve just found some time to read about the recently released pushbutton engine, a modular ActionScript 3 engine tailored especially for game development. It seems that Jeff Tunnel & Co (of Garage Games fame) were sitting down and wrote some serious ActionScript library overnight.
“…and a component system which lets you easily package game functionality into reusable modules. The component system draws on nearly a decade of game development history…”
This looks very promising indeed and the component structure makes a lot of sense.
I’ve been working on the hexagonLib on and off but time is sparse currently and so it seems I would never get it into a decent release state. I Might as well see how the pb engine works out for me. Let’s see how this engine fits for my current role-playing game project!
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Saturday, May 26th, 2007
A valuable resource for everyone who is thinking/planning to write a roleplaying game … Indie developer Planewalker Games who are currently making their debut RPG The Broken Hourglass are publishing precious bits of insider information about their game engine called WeiNGINE. The Broken Hourglass is a computer roleplaying game with a strong visual relation to late nineties RPG pearls like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment (who all were based on the Infinity Engine).
Some examples of their articles: Inside the Engine – Introduction to Items, Inside the Engine – Introduction to Sprites, Rules and Mechanics – Group Skills … and there’s a whole lot more when navigating through the links at the bottom of the pages. I kind of soak up such detailed information on game/RPG design as such things are sparsely seeded on the web (you will not see such information leaking from commercial developers!)
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 24th, 2006
In my book “How to become a Flash Game Developer of World Class” I surely will not forget to mention this useful tool … FreeMind, a Mind Mapping tool that is not only free but also very intuitive! It is written in Java and therefore available for all common Platforms. Where other Mind Mapping tools or even MS Visio fails with being intuitive, FreeMind comes to the rescue!
You can lay out all imaginal hierarchical structures, be it your shopping list, you time plan or the story concept for your next game. After creating a new document with FreeMind, it has one root node. From now on you can add child nodes with the Insert Key, add sibling nodes below with the Enter key or above with Shift+Enter. This way it becomes a breeze to create a large tree structure of your project.
You can assign different color and font styles to your nodes. Another useful feature is the ability to link two nodes together with a bezier line. The tool has a MinMap and a Browse Mode and you can even browse your harddisks file structure with it if you want. You can also link files to nodes.
This is the number one tool I would recommend for brainstorming but it is very useful to lay out projects in more detail as well. There is also a FreeMind Document Reader that has been written with Flash, though I’m not sure if it can be downloaded and used offline.
Filed under Misc | 2 Comments »
Thursday, May 11th, 2006
I finally spend some time to make myself more familiar with the Flex 2 Beta and this is what came out as a result: Star Wars Name Generator! It’s a small and modest tool to generate random names (obviously). If you’re a fan of the Star Wars Pen & Paper Role-playing game (like me) you might find this tool useful!
You can generate names for planets and for characters, there are some parameters that can be choosen from before pressing the Generate button. After that it will spit out a list of more or less useful names (some of them sound very exotic). Interesting names can then be dragged and dropped onto the right side list. All names in this list are stored in local shared object on the users computer until the Clear button is pressed. The Switch button displays the saved names in a text area from where the names can be copied to the clipboard. (Small update: Works now with latest Flash Player v9).
>> Star Wars Name Generator <<
Filed under Dev, Random Picks | 4 Comments »
