As it turned out this flexible little fella loves to create games just as much as we do! You can check out his website at www.jollyjellyfish.com to see some of the stuff he has created so far.
At the moment Jolly is too busy creating new games so his website is still a bit minimalistic but it’ll give you a good impression of his skills.

To celebrate his new home Jolly has released a new casual game called Billy Beamer.

 
Billy Beamer is a very addictive casual game where you play an alien who has to beam up as many farm animals by combing them into groups of at least three of the same kind. Let’s see if you can make it to the top 10 highscores!
You can play the game online but you can also get it for your iPhone or Android-device.

If you like Jolly as much as we do (can’t imagine you won’t), you can follow him on Twitter: @_jollyjellyfish or you can become fan of his Facebook page.
He would really appreciate it if you drop him a line (or some plankton in his tank) and let him know what you think of his games!

Very annoying if you ask me because I just want to work like I was used to without fla files growing in size with each new project (for no apparent reason).
Luckily I found a very simple solution: clear everything from your library you don’t need any more and then just hit “Save as…” and save as a CS4 file. Thiss step will remove most of the overhead. After this, saving it again as CS5 file will reduce the file-size even more!

This trick is a bit more work than before (and it would make more sense if Flash did it all by itself),  but atleast it gets the job done.

Hopfully an update for CS5 will get rid of this problem once and for all…

front / back (click for full-size on flickr)

You can listen to (and download) the EP here: http://www.ektoplazm.com/free-music/outolintu-boings-tickles/

As of February I quit my job and started as a freelance Flash-designer/developer (by the name of Power-up Media) so it was time for a fresh start all together; I finally made a decent main site (http://www.powerupmedia.nl/), I restyled this blog (hope you like it) and moved it to a new domain (http://blog.powerupmedia.nl/). The main site still needs a little tweaking and it needs a lot more content, but it’s a start…

At the moment I’m trying to figure out what to do with my labs section (http:/labs.powerupmedia.nl/).  I’ll probably combine it either with the main site or with this blog but whatever it’s gonna be, you can expect some changes there as well.

All said and done I’m now open for Flash- and/or design-jobs so if you got any work laying around please don’t hesitate to contact me…

The chalange was to create a new design for their “Tedde”. The shape of the tedde was a given and you were only allowed to use 3 colors (apart from black I guess because some early submission also had 4 colours)
Here is my submission to the contest:

You can check out the full version here:
http://www.tedde.com/store/?p=1007

If you like it please vote for it! (just one click)

Manny thanks

PS: While you’re at it, my colleague would be very pleased if you would vote for his submission as well:
http://www.tedde.com/store/?p=1011

I made this game in collaboration with a colleague of mine (Berthjan Achterop / http://www.berthjan.com/)
I started of with the coding of the engine and Berthjan made the design. After applying the design to the game I animated most of the characters to bring it all to live. The result is a “colums”-like game wrapped in a world of weird (but wonderful) creatures

Enjoy and let me know what you think of it…

PS: here is a nice wallpaper to accompany the game

After over a year of not listening to my nagging collegua (Away3D-team member Fabrice Closier) telling me to start working with (Away)3D, I caved…
I started to experiment a little in Away3D and turned my 2D jellyfish experiment into a 3D version. You can watch the result here: http://www.powerupmedia.nl/#/exp080603

I added a couple of tricks I learned way back when I created levels for Unreal Tournament.
For example I added a second viewport for the skybox (in this case a sphere), because the Away3D Skybox-class is in fact not a real skybox but just a really huge cube rendered in the same viewport as the rest of the scene.
The camera in my skybox viewport points in the same direction as the camera in the main viewport but always stays at point (0,0,0). This way the camera will never approach the side of the skybox, giving the illusion that everything in this viewport is really far away.

All-in-all a good start in Away3D if you ask me. I hope to do some real projects with 3D in the comming weeks…

13×13 dudes, 13×13 pixels each – pixel – fireworks | download

The situation looks like this:


- The two shapes are siblings so they have the same parent (i.o.w. the two shapes can’t be nested).
- The blue oval is on top of the green rectangle.
- I want to know when the mouse leaves the green rectangle.

The problem is that the green rectangle dispatches a ROLL_OUT and MOUSE_OUT event as soon as the mouse hits the blue oval.

I tried all combinations of mouseChildren, buttonMode and enabled on the oval and on the parent of the two clips, but nothing seems to make the oval not “steal focus” of the rectangle.

Here is the source of the test: Rollout test (zip)

I can think of some workarounds (hitArea, using an invisible button, etc.) but I much rather find a straight way to handle this kind of situation.
Since this was never a problem in as2 I believe there should be a decent solution in as3 as well.

If someone has an answer to this problem or knows about a secret property I haven’t tried, please let me know…

I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:

Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://www.powerupmedia.nl/#/exp080302

The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.

Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).

Just fooling around I came up with this result:

Jolly jellyfish - vector animation | download

The movement and generation of the jellyfish is all actionscript (2.0), the “squezing” is timeline-animation…

owl on branch – pixel – fireworks | download

fishtank – pixel – fireworks | download

(Click download for a better view)

air critters – vector – flash cs3 | download

HOOT… – vector – flash cs3 | download

critters – vector – flash cs3 | download

no name - vector – flash cs3 | download

face – vector – flash cs3 | download

Hope you like ‘em. Feel free to use and/or distribute…

It turned out the (old) plugins were the root of the problem and I had to delete them all in order to get my blog up and running again.

Mad as I could be I tried to reinstall new versions of plugins, but since most of the plugins were not yet updated and compatible with the new WordPress version it was still drama and I decided to let it be and leave my blog a big mess (no syntax highlighting, broken tags, etc.).

After a week of snowboard fun I regained the courage to look for new plugins to replace the old ones. And whaddayaknow; I found just the right plugins for my blog. I’m not sure if it was the time plugin-developers needed to update their plugins or the time I needed to cooldown and start a fresh new search but I did it .

SWF and Youtube embedding
To show swf files, youtube videos and other mash-up stuff I now use xhtml-video-embed. This plugin lets you embed different content using a simple [tag] ... [/tag]-markup…
No more fucked-up embedcode in your post editor!

Syntax highlighting
To display my codesnipets in proper format without screwing up the layout of my theme I now use WP-Codebox. It turned out this plugin is even better than my old syntaxhighlighter-plugin!
This plugin uses a <pre lang="LANGUAGE"> ... <pre>-markup and supports a lot of languages (including actionscript). Very nice.

Tagging
For the tags of my post I now use the new tag-feature of WordPress. Since it doesn’t display tags with posts by default I had to find a way to show them anyway and I found the answer right here: http://richgilchrest.com/how-to-add-wordpress-23-tags-to-your-current-theme/
In short; you just have to add a line like the one below into the index.php, archive.php,  and/or single.php file of your theme:
<?php the_tags("<b>Tags:</b> ", ", ", ""); ?>
How easy…

In the end it turned out to be all worth the stress and nail nibbling… justGREAT!

PS: With my blog back in business I decided to change the header and footer of my theme as well. Hope you appreciate it

Whether you are fed up with your marriage (and/or life) or you just want to learn some new Photoshop tricks, you should check out the tutorials of Donnie Hoyle. This desperate guy has a tutorial series called “You Suck at Photoshop”:

Lesson #1:

Lesson #2:

Lesson #3:

Lesson #4:

Lesson #5:

Lesson #6:

Plz, somebody put this guy out of his misery

UPDATE (2008-03-09):
Two new lessons for your ass:

Lesson #7:

Lesson #8:

UPDATE (2008-03-27):
Another new lessons for you to chew on:

Lesson #9:

UPDATE (2008-04-15):
Putting it all in perspective:

Lesson #10:

Apparently it is some weird bug when it comes to multiplying decimals values by 3. Take this little script for example:

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2
3
4
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var j:Number; 
for(var i:int=0; i<10; i++){ 
	j = i/10; 
	trace(j+"*3 =\t"+(j*3)); 
}

It outputs:
0*3 = 0
0.1*3 = 0.30000000000000004
0.2*3 = 0.6000000000000001
0.3*3 = 0.8999999999999999
0.4*3 = 1.2000000000000002
0.5*3 = 1.5
0.6*3 = 1.7999999999999998
0.7*3 = 2.0999999999999996
0.8*3 = 2.4000000000000004
0.9*3 = 2.7

And it doesn’t stop just there. The same problems occur when adding a decimal value to the double of it’s value:

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trace(.1+.2) //0.30000000000000004 
trace(.2+.4) //0.6000000000000001 
trace(.3+.6) //0.8999999999999999 
trace(.4+.8) //1.2000000000000002

The problem occurres in Javascript as well as in Actionscript (and probably some other languages too) so it’s probably caused by the way decimal values are treated at byte-level. Because it’s not likely there will be a fix for this soon, here is a little workaround:
i = int(i *10)/10; //use int() in favour of Math.round() to speed up the code

Flash on the Beach 07 was just GREAT!

Although I had to miss some of the sessions on Wednesday because of the amazing party on Tuesday (read: loads of beer and dropshot) the whole event inspired me to really start experimenting in Flash again.

In contrast to Mad in Spain (which was mostly about great webdesign) this event was all about Flashy-artwork (it was to me anyway).
Almost every session I went to dealt with particles, algorithms, particles, fractals and then some more particles….

Fractals all over the place…

The absolute particle/algorithm/fractal climax was Jared Tarbell’s session “Algorithms to Fill Space”. Although I was familiar with the basics of the algorithms and particles, this session made me see how easy it mas to make very complex and cool experiments with them.

Another great and very funny session was Joshua Davis‘ “Dynamic Abstraction”. This guy makes just GREAT art using mainly flash. Although his site doesn’t fully do justice to his work you should check it out because he has some great pieces there…

Besides these two amazing sessions there was a lot more that inspired me. As I want to spend most of my time experimenting in stead of updating my blog here is a little sum-up of these sessions (no particular order):

- Alex Jenkins – Pulling the emotional trigger
A session with a some very entertaining websites. Check the Unit9 portfolio:
http://www.unit9.com/

- Seb Lee – Delisle AS3 Particle Effects – Now 1000% Extra FREE!
A great session about the basics of particles. Although the session started of very easy, it got more interesting near the end as it showed some really pragmatic solutions to common problems (e.g. with a few tweaks you can make your particles look like real smoke without speed loss). Check out the Plug-in Media! site for some cool effects!
http://www.pluginmedia.net/

- Keith Peters – Make Flash Games. Retire Early
A session about how to make money of your “simple” flash games. Since I already have some game engines in store I really need to turn them in to real games and start making money.
His site is more about his experiments but it’s really worth to check out:
http://www.bit-101.com/

- Craig Swann - Perceptive Interactions + Alternative Interfaces
A nice and inspiring session about Craig’s experiments with alternative in- and out-put. The experiments are a weird combination of video, sound, webcam, and a bunch of home-made electronic input devices. Check the lab-section on his site for some of the freaky shit.
http://www.crashmedia.com/

- Robert Hodgin - Breaking away
Although (or maybe because) his work was not made in Flash, it was just fucking GREAT! By using processing this guy created the most amazing art. Check his blog for some of his work (make sure to check the videos).
http://www.flight404.com/

- Erik Natzke – Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Playing
I’m not a big fan of his work (particularly the old stuff) but he has got some nice pieces out there.
http://jot.eriknatzke.com/

There were a lot more interesting speakers, but as a already mentioned I really like to get busy right now my self. So after I finish my uncles portfolio site (any time now) you should expect some great experiments and games! Stay tuned…

This time we’re going with six people from <theFactor.e> Flash/Flex team. I hope to be even more inspired by this trip than the previous one.

Stay tuned…

AllOfUs:
A really cool agency that showed some amazing mobile phone apps and interactive installations. They really gave me the inspiration to create new experiments (if only they could give me some more time as well).
site: http://www.allofus.org/

Group94:
I was already familiar with their amazing work, but it was really nice to see how they handle their projects and how they solved some complicated Flash problems with really simple solutions. The most surprising thing about Group94 is that they work with only 8 people and yet manage to create so much fantastic products.
site: http://www.group94.com/
old site: http://www.group94.com/home_old.php 

Pleix:
A group of freelancers with various disciplines who join together to create cool commercials, music videos and non-commercial films.
site: http://www.pleix.net/

de-construct:
A webdesign agency who have a great vision towards user experience on their websites. A nice example of this is a site they made for Panasonic:
http://lumixdifference.archive.de-construct.com/
The three cameras that are exposed on the site are presented in a short story. Each camera has it’s own story in which it’s characteristics are displayed. This way the user is not directly confronted with all kind of specs (which he has to compare to find the right camera), but he can simply select a camera by a specific purpose. A very nice approach towards potential customers if you ask me.
site: http://www.de-construct.com/

Of course there were a lot of other interesting speakers but for now I’ll leave this post to these four agencies because I need my time to work out my newborn ideas.

Stay tuned….

PS: drop a line to the guys of DoubleYou:
http://www.doubleyouhi.com/