Last weekend was the 27th edition of the game development jam Ludum Dare. The theme for this competition was “10 seconds”. As usual, I contributed with a game of my own – something called Hijack Humans Hastily. It was an AS3 game (made with Nape and Starling) in which the objective was to use a […]

Adobe AIR’s new GameInput APIs are great. They provide seamless, powerful input from game pads for Android, desktop and web applications created in Flash. However, it has two important problems right now. Since those warrant some explanation, I figured I’d make a post about it hopes it’ll help other people working with those APIs. The […]

I was curious about the latency of the GameInput API in Adobe AIR and decided to test it a bit using my game prototype. I tested it both as a desktop app, and as an OUYA game. Here’s the results, first in the desktop: And in the OUYA: Perhaps it’s not very clear by the […]

As I’m building my AS3 game prototype, one question I’m constantly debating is whether I should use Box2DFlash or Nape as my physics engine of choice. This prototype is heavily focused on realistic physics, so the debate has been intense. On the one hand, Box2D is a tried and proven solution, one that’s easy to […]

In general, dealing with keyboard input in ActionScript 3 is fairly easy: you simply listen for KeyboardEvents, and react accordingly. This works very well when the user is interacting with a graphical user interface – you simply turn your event listeners on and off, and wait for something to happen. When developing games, however, this […]

As part of my messing around the OUYA and the new GameInput API on AIR 3.7, I started creating a class to abstract controller/key input binding for AS3 projects. I’ll post more about that in the future, but for now, here’s a spreadsheet that’s part of my research. It lists all the game controllers I’ve […]

When creating games (or, really, any sort of animation) using ActionScript, most developers rely on the ENTER_FRAME event to synchronize their actions with when a frame is being rendered on the screen (effectively using it as their game loop). In any way you look at it, that’s the right way to do it, but it […]

I’ve been toying around with creating OUYA content with Adobe AIR, and I’m happy to say it’s a pretty easy and straightforward development workflow. Information on it is hard to come by, though, and the official Adobe AIR support samples doesn’t seem to exist anymore, so here’s a few high-level notes on how to get […]