The BASIC language is now 50 years old. TIME Magazine has a cool article on it and how it came to be. When I started using computers, first with a ZX81 clone, then an Apple II clone, and then a MSX 1.0 clone, BASIC was the only thing that I knew exusted. It was synonym […]
Continue reading →Once again, a Ludum Dare game compo has ended. This means I spent this past weekend creating a game from scratch, and even though it’s a simple thing, I think this is the first time I can say I created a more well-rounded game experience for Ludum Dare. The result is called Escape Enclosures Expeditiously […]
Continue reading →Just as a heads up, Firstborn is looking for a senior-level AS3 developer for our NY offices. You can find more information about this position here. We’re still saying to ourselves “I can’t believe we’re looking for a Flash developer”. Truth be told, while Firstborn has established its reputation for visual interface acuity in the […]
Continue reading →After a lot of breaking things, refactoring, and testing, I’ve finally merged the experimental branch of KeyActionBinder into the main branch of the project. The biggest change, of course, is making the functionality of this gamepad support library more automatic, in the sense that it tries to detect whatever game device the user has connected […]
Continue reading →To build the list of known GameInput controls spreadsheet, I had to build a small sandbox-like application test for controls reported by connected devices. It was my intention to make this available to other people so they could do their own tests, so here it is: just wait for the following Flash movie to load […]
Continue reading →When I am programming something that requires a module or a sub-system of any kind, my first impulse is to always write it myself; sometimes, even rewriting things I had already written before. While there’s a danger in doing too much of this and avoiding well-established solutions to common problems – the syndrome of Not Invented […]
Continue reading →As expected, the new PS4 controller works out-of-the-box once connected to a Windows PC (using a USB cable) with no need for any special drivers. As such, it works seamlessly when using the GameInput API in Flash or Adobe AIR applications. I have updated the spreadsheet of known GameInput controls with the appropriate control ids. […]
Continue reading →When I set out to write a class to simplify game input control in ActionScript 3, I started from the assumption that Adobe AIR’s GameInput device control ids (the ids that relate to each button or axis) would be fairly consistent between platforms. The idea was that the class would just hide away the Keyboard […]
Continue reading →I use a lot of XML files on my most of my projects (Flash, Android or otherwise). I like the idea of having some configurations parameter on easily editable text files, and not having to re-compile a project just to change a behavior slightly; where I can, instead, just edit a configuration file, re-run the […]
Continue reading →The full archive for the Game Developer Magazine is now available for free on the GDC Vault in PDF format. This is an incredible (and sadly missed) magazine. I recommend any aspiring, hobbyist, or independent game developer peruse through this archive. It contains many insightful articles for all fields related to game development, from audio […]
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