Guide to Mochi Media services – How to set up a game and enable for Live Update

I am using Mochi Media services for almost four years and I was the first to use their in-game leaderboards, so when I recommend them I know what I am talking about.

What happened during these years? Mochi grew a lot and from a simple service to display ads and let you earn money, like a lot more you can find on the web, became a complete solution to improve players’ experience allowing you to track links, introduce achievements, leaderboards, in-game shops and more, while keeping the main feature: let developers make money with their games.

With this huge set of offers, often new developers get lost and end with adding Mochi APIs without the full control of their power.

This guide will cover all Mochi services with a real world example, to make clear how to get the most out of your game and the Mochi API.

Your first Mochi game

If you aren’t already registered with Mochi Media do it, and once you are logged in select ADD GAME [...]

Read more: Guide to Mochi Media services – How to set up a game and enable for Live Update

Loops With int and uint

AS3 has two integer types: int and uint. In my experience, most AS3 programmers just use int everywhere and ignore uint. This is usually acceptable as the need for unsigned integers is rare compared to their signed counterparts. However, there are significant performance differences between the two. Read on for the impact of uint on [...]

Loops With int and uint

Create a Racing Game Without a 3D Engine

This tutorial will give you an alternative to 3D for racing games in ActionScript 3. No external framework is required for this old-school style example.

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Final Result Preview

Let’s take a look at the final result we will be working towards:

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Step 1: Set up the FLA Document

Create a new Flash document set for ActionScript 3.0. I’ll be using dimensions of 480x320px, a frame rate of 30 FPS, and a light blue background. Save the file with a name of your choice.

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Step 2: Create a Document Class

Besides the FLA, we also need to create a document class. Create a new Actionscript file, and add this code:

package
{
 import flash.display.MovieClip;

 public class Main extends MovieClip
 {
  public function Main()
  {

  }
 }
}

Save this file in the same directory as our FLA. Name it Main.as.

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Step 3: Link the Main Class with the FLA

In order to compile the code from the Main class, we need to link it with the FLA. On the Properties panel of the FLA, next to Class, enter the name of the document class, in this case, Main.

Then, save the changes on the FLA.

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Step 4: Draw a Road Line

[...]

Read more: Create a Racing Game Without a 3D Engine

Flixel Power Tools v1.7 – Kaboom!

It’s been a month in development but it’s finally here – Version 1.7 of the Flixel Power Tools has now gone from dev to master – and I urge you all to give it a play! I have also re-organised my site so that the tools and all sub-classes are now easily accessible from the right-hand side bar. More info, more screen shots, less scrolling

V1.7 includes a brand new Demo Suite system (don’t forget to try the Credits button ). It’s now easier and quicker to get to the examples, which is just as well as we’ve over 60 of them in this release. Don’t forget to download the whole package from github, as it includes a Getting Started manual PDF, the full source code to all of the demos, all of the graphical and audio assets (warning: copyright, don’t use commercially!), as well as the tools themselves [...]

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How to create a Flash platformer using Citrus Engine

More than a year ago I shows you how to create a little game prototype using Citrus Engine.

A year has passed, and now Citrus Engine is back with version 2.0 which promises to let us create complex games in a quick.

For all you specs maniacs, here it is a brief list of features:

* Blazing 50 FPS in the browser on current machines, and 250+ FPS on the desktop (or Adobe AIR).
* Integrated with Box2D physics, which allows for tumbling crates, pulleys, vehicles, and just about anything else you can imagine, without the limitations of a grid.
* Supports multiple rendering methods with very little code. Like blitting and sprite sheets? Citrus Engine’s got it. Prefer animating using the timeline? No problem.
* Hijack the Flash IDE and use it as a level editor, for easily laying out and iterating on level designs.
* Robust documentation includes and ASDoc API, tutorial videos, and a forum.
* Standards-based code API means developers and designers spend more time tweaking the fun stuff, and less time debugging.
* Level-based progressive downloading allows gamers to start playing the game quicker by only downloading what the next level needs.
* Pre-made commonly used objects, like a hero, coins, enemy, platforms, clouds, and more!
* Easily use embedded or dynamic graphics.
* Decoupled architecture allows for custom rendering methods, like blitting or 3D.
* Sound management
* Keyboard and input management
* Built-in particle system
* Intuitive Signals event framework

Ok, the boring part is over. Now take this little prototype I made in 20 minutes (yes, 20 minutes):

Look at what we have:

* The hero (on the bottom right)
* A pushable crate (on the bottom left)
* Some platforms around the stage
* A moving platform
* An enemy (on the upper right corner)
* A coin (on the upper right corner)

Move the hero with LEFT and RIGHT and jump with SPACE. Try to grab the coin. See what happens if you touch the enemy. The game mechanics are complex enough to represent a level of a good platformer. But it took me only a few lines to do it.

This is the main class [...]

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Well-Armored Warrior:ActionScript 3.0 Decorator for Beginners

Decorating an Object
In looking over the chapter on the Decorator pattern in our book I’ve felt that maybe I picked too complex a set of examples. In a Decorator example on this blog I attempted to remedy that with a very easy yet somewhat abstract example. However, I’ve decided to try and have a hugely [...]

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Quick Tip: How to Randomly Shuffle an Array in AS3

Sometimes you have a set of items — could be Strings, could be Numbers, could be Objects, whatever — whose order you want to randomise. This is particularly useful for quizzes and games of chance, but comes in handy in all sorts of other applications. The easiest method I’ve found for doing this is to stick all the items in an Array and then shuffle it like a deck of cards. But how can we do that…?

As a simple example, we’ll use the letters of the alphabet:

var letters:Array = ["A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", "W", "X", "Y", "Z"];

There are different approaches we can take to actually sorting this array.

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The Naive Approach

We could create a second array, and copy each element of the first into a random position in the second:

The code for that might look like this (see this Quick Tip on getting a random integer within a specific range for more details):

var letters:Array = ["A", "B", "C", "D", "E", "F", "G", "H", "I", "J", "K", "L", "M", "N", "O", "P", "Q", "R", "S", "T", "U", "V", "W", "X", "Y", "Z"];
var shuffledLetters:Array = new Array(letters.length);

var randomPos:int = 0;
for (var i:int = 0; i < letters.length; i++)
{
 randomPos = int(Math.random() * letters.length);
 shuffledLetters[randomPos] = letters[i];
}

But there’s one huge problem. What if the random position picked for C is 6 as well?

Here, A gets overwritten, and will therefore not be in the shuffled array. That’s not what we want, so we need to check that the slot is empty before copying the letter over, and pick a different slot if it isn’t: [...]

Read more: Quick Tip: How to Randomly Shuffle an Array in AS3