Dropkick Chopstick

www.meetgooya.com: my upcoming new home on the web

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 08:18:36 -0400

www.meetgooya.com: my upcoming new home on the web

Complete redesigned screen / characters / UI / etc.

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:47:20 -0400

Complete redesigned screen / characters / UI / etc.

Redesigned gameplay / in-game screens

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:45:13 -0400

Redesigned gameplay / in-game screens

Redesigned Game Characters

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:44:00 -0400

Redesigned Game Characters

texturism

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:06:00 -0400

visit texturism for a daily dose of wonderful visual inspiration.

Having a blast at WWDC

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:44:00 -0400

Not many updates on the tumblog lately, mostly because I’m busy walking around and listening to sessions on WWDC09. If you’re here, contact me via twitter and we can meet up: @stupidapp

In a weird way, I’m more comfortable thinking about naming...

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:03:03 -0400

In a weird way, I’m more comfortable thinking about naming / attitude and concept when creating an identity for something than when trying to creating the thing itself.

– here’s another concept poster.

I’m working on some fun concept posters to help me...

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:07:17 -0400

I’m working on some fun concept posters to help me finalize naming / characters / general attitude.

Some character sketches, with transparent guns and some...

Sun, 31 May 2009 18:31:00 -0400

Some character sketches, with transparent guns and some firepower.
Huge thanks to Matan Liberman for the character design help.

Early sketch of the “Zod Empire” map screen from my...

Sun, 31 May 2009 09:29:39 -0400

Early sketch of the “Zod Empire” map screen from my game. (More shots to come.)

KitchenSync: AS3 animation library

Mon, 18 May 2009 17:12:32 -0400

KitchenSync: AS3 animation library:

Just started using KitchenSync, getting started was real easy (just dropped the big “org” folder in my source tree, and FlexBuilder immediately autocompleted and added imports properly). Nice.

Got a WWDC Scholarship

Sat, 02 May 2009 04:51:35 -0400

Just found out I got the WWDC Scholarship, hope to meet everyone from last year and generally have a blast. (and have a game to show off there, too.)

toucharcade.com

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:03:26 -0400

toucharcade.com:

I’m not sure how I missed this blog until now. Brilliant.

BoxCAD: a nice Box2D based editor with AS3 code generation

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:31:57 -0400

BoxCAD: a nice Box2D based editor with AS3 code generation

log.maniacalrage.net

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:03:00 -0400

log.maniacalrage.net:

Tumblogs, and especially well made one like maniacalrage, are truly inspiring: it’s a new form of small, minimal blogging, clear of clutter. They probably are easy to maintain as well - drop links without too much fuss, chat quotes, images, etc.

Inside Digital Foundry (where 0.3 fps does matter)

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 18:43:24 -0400

Inside Digital Foundry (where 0.3 fps does matter):

Gotta love these kinds of geeky ultra-technical blogs. Good times.

50 Tumblelogs that will make your inspiration go nitro

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:41:04 -0400

50 Tumblelogs that will make your inspiration go nitro:

I’m always on the lookout for good tumblogs, and this wonderful list from Inspired Magazine is a goldmine.

Objective-C for Actionscript developers

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:33:00 -0400

I just found a great series of short tutorials introducing Objective-C concepts to Actionscript developers in the Teknision Blog. Looks mighty useful to me.

The tutorials are:
AS3 to Objective-C : Data Types
AS3 to Objective-C : Syntax
AS3 to Objective-C : Memory Management
AS3 to Objective-C : Help and Resources

Sweet.

Using AppleScript to wire Flex Builder, Flash CS4 and Debug Flash Player together

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:19:42 -0400

Since I’ve been doing quite a lot of AS3 development lately, I got increasingly annoyed by the fact that I can’t compile my entire project inside Flex Builder.

I’m using Flash CS4 as a level designer - where I visually drop movieclips of game elements and have physics and gameplay apply to them in runtime, but I also use Flex Builder for all the code writing. The problem is, that since .fla files need to be built, I have to use Flash to “Test Movie” / Publish each time I want to run the game prototype, and can only wire Flex Builder to the resulting .swf for debug.

In order to smooth this annoyance a bit, I wired Flex Builder, Flash CS4 and Debug Flash Player together into one key stroke: hit F5 in Flex Builder causes Flash CS4 to come forward, publish my .fla and then switches back to flex builder, to run it’s manually setup Debug command. (which runs Debug Flash Player with the resulting SWF)

Here’s how you can make it work:

1. Download the standalone Debug Flash Player from Adobe (direct link here) and Follow the tutorial in this link to wire Flex Builder to debug .swf files published by the Flash CSx.

2. Fire up Apple’s Script Editor, paste the follwing code and replace the names (within the quotes) where needed:

tell application “Debug Flash Player” to quit

tell application “Adobe Flash CS4” to activate

tell application “System Events”
tell process “Adobe Flash CS4”
tell menu bar 1
tell menu “File”
click menu item “Publish”
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell

delay 5

tell application “Flex Builder” to activate

tell application “System Events”
tell process “Flex Builder”
tell menu bar 1
tell menu bar item “Run”
tell menu “Run”
tell menu item “Debug”
tell menu “Debug”
click menu item “NAME-OF-YOU-CUSTOM-DEBUG-SETTING”
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell

3. Save the AppleScript is an application (.app) - hit File -> Save As and choose Application from the combobox.

4. Define this app as an external tool in Flex Builder (Run Menu -> External Tools -> Open External Tools Dialog…) Give it a name like “PublishAndDebug” and point the Location field in the dialog to the .app file created by the script editor

5. Use the Mac’s Keyboard & Mouse preference pane in System Preferences, to define a new keyboard shortcut for that action in Flex Builder (in the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, hit the small [+] button, than fill the information according to the image below)

Viola. If you survived the long list of steps, you can now hit F5 in Flex Builder, and have Flash CSx come up, publish the movie, wait 5 sec, have the Flex Builder come up and launch the .swf for debug.

Sweet.

Resource / Devtool dump

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:25:00 -0400

During the last two weeks, I’ve been checking several developer tools and flash libraries in order to go further with my game prototype, among them are:

Torque 2D Game Builder

Vex2D: Flash vectors -> Box2D physics converter / framework
(The command line util itself, v2d.exe requires the .Net 2.0 framework, but works fine for me with Mono for Mac.)

A Guide on tile-based side scrolling in Flash.