Bits & Pieces of individual Game Development
mdm is working on a new tool named Rebus that can turn AS3 (and Flex2) files into .NET2 executables. It’s still in beta but registered users can download and test it. I’ve did a quick test and compiled my SWNameGen with Rebus and it went surprisingly smooth and flawless. It will offer some new and interesting extensions, to quote from the mdm support forums …
MainType is a relatively new font managing tool (for Win only) that puts Extensis Suitcase to shame! I’ve been trying Suitcase for a while but finding and activating fonts with it was a major pain in the butt. You had to dig around in the preview list on the right and then to activate the font you once again had to search for the same font in the left side list (all with no mousewheel support).
After I was fed up with Suitcase I went with OT1 fontmanager for quite a while but this manager, while a crapload better than Suitcase, runs a bit unstable and doesn’t support some important formats. It also can only install/uninstall fonts but not activate them temporarily. There are also a ton of other font managing tools out there but almost all I’ve came across so far didn’t fulfill my requirements.
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 <<
As a one-man-game developer of worldclass (exaggeration intended!) it’s good to have a bunch of tools at hand that help with the tasks for creating games! In this series I will introduce helpful ‘nice to have’ or even ‘must have’ tools that make a game developers/designers day easier. In this part I will cover Alias SketchBook Pro …
I’ve bought myself a periphery some days ago about which I was pondering to buy for a long time already, a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet! I choose the smallest version 4×5 since I’m not a drawing pro and have limited desktop real estate and the smallest one suffices pretty well for just some sketching.
Alcon is a lightweight external output console for Flash ActionScript that allows developers to view debugging information without relying on the Flash IDE. SWF files can be debugged and monitored no matter if they are in the web browser, Flash Player or a standalone executable. While that Alcon tries to keep inclusion into projects as simple as possible. In fact all that needs to be done is importing the Debug class into a project and you are ready to send debug information to the console with a simple Debug.trace() command.
Included into a project Alcon keeps a small footprint and takes less than a Kilobyte of filesize while still offering some other helpful features.
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