Known Issues with Adobe products on Mac OS 10.7 Lion : http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/905/cpsid_90508.html I’m on CS5.5, so it’s not that big a deal for me. The main problem is Flash Player, which is a b...

The two short videos below are a battle demo of Kingdom Wars, a game built by three people. Technically there's no problem, and the core features are done, but the art assets aren't ready, so the buildings, unit types, and hit animations are all pretty sparse, and the map was drawn on the fly too. Being a front-end dev with no artist is just brutal, you know!

Compiled last month from https://github.com/eidiot/robotlegs-framework/wiki/, PDF file, left-click to open, right-click to save as

Carving a cutout (a circle or ellipse) out of a large dark shadow: once a sub-shape cache has been built, bitmap channel subtraction is cheaper than drawing a Shape with blend mode ERASE — but buil...

Bookmark this award-winning game, Monster Tower Defense — A novel tower defense game themed around monster evolution, putting your strategy, raising, and prediction skills to the test. It’s currently an early access version — races like the Star Spirits and the Undead will be showing up later, so stay tuned! Basic controls: W, S, A, D to control direction, left mouse button to attack, E to devour, F to cast a skill, R to spend 500 gold to restore 2000 HP to your base, ESC to cancel during the tower-building phase, and to upgrade a tower just click the icon of a tower you’ve already built.

Team Introduction This team is a group of game development professionals who came together after working on three products across two companies. l Team strengths: 12–36 months and more than three products of working together; solid rapport, workflows, and development habits. (The longest-serving member has over 35 months of joint development behind them; the shortest, no less than 12 months)

Just discovered that Flash’s DisplayObject/getBounds can’t work out the correct size in a tween that contains only vector graphics — it always returns the shape region from the previous keyfra...

I first crossed paths with Flash years ago, and it was love at first sight. I remember that several years back, small Flash games were hugely popular, and I was blown away by the Xiao Xiao series of Flash animations. Back then I played Xiao Xiao No. 4 over and over, and quietly made up my mind: one day I’d throw myself into the Flash world, build Flash pieces with real visual impact, and create games that are actually fun to play. After I started working, I did Flash website development and Flash virtual community development, and in my spare time I never stopped playing games. Through the day-in, day-out accumulation of work and play, I picked up a lot of inspiration and kept writing it down; some of those ideas gradually grew into a system, and I looked forward to turning them into a series of games and realizing the dream I once had. The reality, though, is no sponsorship and no return. Even though the games I design are ones I’d enjoy playing myself, I can only treat developing these mini-games as a hobby. I always hoped I’d find the spare time to finish them slowly, and hoped that one day my friends could play them and have fun with them. The result? The first few weeks I was full of energy, but then the daily job got busy, my own game inched forward, then stalled. I often felt I had no motivation — the moment I finished my day job, all I wanted was a couple of rounds of StarCraft II and then bed. Time always moves too fast. I watch helplessly as my long-delayed hobby game stays a dream.

Since the project needs to render a large number of characters on the same screen, I needed to improve Flash Player’s rendering performance. This afternoon I ran a rendering performance test and polished up the bitmap optimization library I wrote last year. Screen size 2880*2880500 vector character animation MCs (nested 2 levels deep), looping playbackNone of them removeChild off-screen regionsAll tests run with the Flash Player SA 10.0 debug build No optimization, straight addChild fps=4, CPU maxed out, memory 18M~29M Added cacheAsBitmap FPS=1, CPU maxed out, memory 156~196M, memory keeps fluctuating

In my recent project, since the team has quite a few junior ActionScript devs, what was supposed to be pathfinding got cut down to straight-line collision. And the tragic part is, they still tell me the straight-line collision is broken. Yesterday a guy was having the character do a per-pixel collision check after every step to decide whether it could walk. Let me repeat myself one more time: that’s both inaccurate and inefficient. Today I’m posting this example to show the recommended way to do straight-line collision: first draw a line and hit-test it against the walkable/blocked model, and only once you’ve confirmed the destination is reachable do you move the character straight there (speed control can come later, it’s unrelated to this example).