Flash Game Development Inter-web mash up: March 8, 2009

The latest in Blog entries and articles that might interest Flash game developers.

This time we cover: A selection of blogs entries on subject
ranging from Eclipse v. Flashdevelop to art imitating life imitating art in the
Flash world; Tutorials ranging from tower defense game development to an avoider
game that uses 8bitrocket music loops; Helpful hints from the field on subjects
like a Firefox Flash 10 AS3 search plug-in to best practices for Flex
development; Some awesome new indie  Flash games, Mochi updates and much
more.

From the blogs
– Mark (ickydime) G. reflects eloquently
on both

garbage collection and his choice of

Eclipse over Flash Develop. I have to say that I would probably use Eclipse
on my Mac if I could have ever figured out how to get it and the Flex 3 plug-in
working properly. I never did, so I use trusty ‘ol Flash Develop. They plan to
add a profiler soon, so that’s a plus.
– On that note, read Lain
Lobb’s article on why he likes Flash Develop that caused Mark to write his
rebuttal.
– From  Shane McCartney’s “Lost In Actionscript” Blog :

His Pixel Bender examples from Google Code. Also check out his awesome list
of very valuable Actionscript 3 optimizations:

Part 1,

Part 2. Talk about someone who knows his shit!
– Mr. Sun

encourages all of you to learn PHP, and gives you some good reasons why (of
course). I could not agree more!
– The

4K game Competition is coming to a close. Did you get you entry in on time?
– Scott Delamater has been working on an
entry for the 4K comp also.
I’ve played it and it is amazing what he fit into the limited space.
– AS
Gamer
launched new forums.
– The always interesting Gaming Your Way has new
posts on
3d rendering (nGfx) and on art
imitating life imitating art (Squize).

New Tutorials and Example Code to expand your skills

– Mr. Sun finished up his great set of tutorials on

creating a Tower Defense game in AS3.
– Emanuele added

part 5 to his AS3 Game Structure series. This time he tackles Mochi Ads in
one line of code.
– AS Gamer has

a new tutorial on creating Asteroids style 360 degree movement.
–
Michael James Williams

added part 9 to his Avoider game tutorial. This time he covers sound and
music (using a music a loop from our 
8bitrocket library).

Helpful hints from the field
– Richard Davey has created
a very

useful Flash 10 search Plug-In for Firefox. Using the Open Search framework,
it will search the Flash 10 documentation for AS3.
– Lain Lobb’s article on
how doing

Flash Development the “right” way. (welcome to 8bitrocket.com, Lain. I’m not
sure how I missed your great site before now)
– The Flash Enabled Blog

adds a link to a series of best practices for creating Flex apps.

Game Monetization
– Mochi has

combined their Ads and Services API into one unified package that is more
powerful  and easier to use than ever.

 Game Programming Articles, tutorials and hint outside the world of
Actionscript
– Emanuele has a

nice write up on some Javascript libraries for making browser based games.
– Gamasutra has a nice post on

optimization of  game performance through aligning data properly.

Some games to check out
– Play the very fun and well done
Puzzle Vibes by
thegamecenter.com (Tomas Mertens)
– Try out
build 16 of Squize’s
latest masterpiece, X(treme).
– Richard Davey’s

absolutely incredible looking Flash 4K game entry (spoiler alert).
–
Mochi Flash Game Friday winner, the awesome
Death vs
The Monsters

As always, visit Flashgameblogs.com for your daily dose…