Carlos Pita, aka ElPitaMan, has posted some one of his work on You Tube. It is an animated holiday ecard created for the clients of Televisia. He not only does the animation, but also does all the voices in his creations. Dude is incredible.

My other bud, Ansar Sattar entered the Animae Caribe Animation and New Media Festival, and won the Best Caribbean Animation award. He took on the difficult task of alerting Trinidad audiences to the threat of dengue fever borne by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, and made the presentation a funny informative cartoon. Dang! He actually pulled off making that topic interesting and fun. Awesome work!

Ansar in the News: Ansar Sattar drawing attention with Trini-style fine tooning

DCF

-DCF

According to WikiPedia:

“A casual game is a video game targeted at a mass audience of casual gamers. Casual games can have any type of gameplay, and fit in any genre. They are typically distinguished by their simple rules, in contrast to more complex hardcore games. They require no long-term time commitment or special skills to play, and there are comparatively low production and distribution costs for the producer. Casual games typically are played on a personal computer online in web browsers, although they now are starting to become popular on game consoles, too. Casual gaming demographics also vary greatly from those of traditional computer games, as the typical casual gamer is older and more predominantly female, with over 74% of those purchasing casual games being women.”

Whatever they are, they are becoming more popular and hardcore developers are starting to leave their hardcore development positions to pursue creating them. I have often thought that the gaming industry of late seemed kind of stagnant. PC games seem to be going the way of the dinosaur, and consoles definitely rule. It appears that we have not innovated very much in game play and concepts (Wii excluded), and there are certainly untapped audiences that are put off by the available genre, or the investment required in time and money to participate in our current gaming offering.

With the new tools and technologies that are becoming available, things may start to change a bit in terms of the types of games that are available. Where in the past creating a best selling title required an entire team of developers, artist, producers, musicians, and marketers to get out the door, today it is quite possible to once again produce a quality piece with a small team. I mentioned earlier in previous post tools that are very well suited for casual game development. Obviously, I’m most interested in what is happening with Flash.

In a matter of weeks, Flash 10 is going to be released and a new development paradigm will be upon us. What excites me most about this release is that the upgrade to the Flash player is fairly extensive. The addition of 3D Effects, Drawing API Enhancements, RTMFP, and GPU compositing and blitting are all very exciting to a multimedia developer interested in game development. So much will now be possible in Flash and hopefully Flash will explode in popularity again. More developers will be able to “casually” release their games without all the associated overhead of the past. More people will be able to “casually” access a game.  Certainly, there is much development work ahead as developers decipher and apply this upgraded API, but from where I’m looking, it feels like at the very least some very nice casual games will be possible with this environment. I suspect that the Flash player 10 penetration will be rapid.

Check out the article: The Rise of Casual Gaming

-DCF

Today, TrueSpace (TS) is still around and in version 7.6. What is really interesting is that the company that created it, Caligari is now owned by Microsoft. To make things even more interesting, Microsoft has elected to release TS7.6 free of charge as of this past July. Some speculate that this may be in answer to Google’s SketchUp, and that TS7.6 exports directly to Virtual Earth. That’s all well and good, but all I know is that a 3D software package plus video tutorials, and plug-in SDK that ran about $600 is now free. Couple that with the Flash export plugin, and it becomes very compelling indeed. Kind of reminds me of a Swift3D by Electric Rain but on steroids.

Download the whole shebang at:  www.caligari.com

DCF

As I have said in earlier post, we are at the beginning of a new paradigm. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are on the rise, and we are at the beginning of a new generation of web based media. With this release of Flash that adds so much to the API, whole new media engines can now be realized. Things we never could do in Flash before, are rapidly becoming a reality. This is a crazy time because it opens up so many possibilities. It feels to me like the old days of the Internet when folks were believing the hype and throwing money. Folks are pretty cautious today, but we seem to be a whole lot closer to the hype and promise that spawned so many companies back in the day. I feel like a prospector back in the gold rush era, out staking my claim before the masses get wind of it. Just with the current Flash 3D engines alone, companies are starting to throw big money for anyone that has one mastered.

Now, this “Tricks” book is based on programming in DirectX, but no matter as the algorithms and 3D concepts are platform independent. The book talks about how to build software based 3D engines, and that is where we currently are in Flash. There are no other books out there that address this in one complete volume. I imagine, there will be a 3D book written for Flash one of these days. For now, I’m combing all my old books for techniques, because I truly believe that we are at the point where the old school techniques for game development now apply to this “new technology”. Andre probably never dreamed that his book would be used quite this way. Who would have thought Flash would come this far?

-D-

Gaia is an open-source front-end Flash Framework for AS3 and AS2 designed to dramatically reduce development time. Just about everything that you need for the initial skeleton of a project is there. It is incredibly well structured, and has a great API. It allows for AS3 single and multiple frame coding, and pretty much can set one up with a shell version of your site or app project in about 10 minutes. I have not played with it a great deal just yet, or committed it to a project just yet, but I am looking into it quite extensively. From what I can see, it is brilliant, and saves so much time it is not even funny. For all the issues it address like deep linking, page transitions, browser back/forward functionality, asset management, and preloading this could easily become a standard Framework for Flash developers. Awesome stuff!

Watch The Demo