Cameron McKay

While working on Flash sidescroller stuff I noticed that there was no easy way (that I could find) to create multiple sprites from a single bitmap (something you’d do when doing a tile-based graphics layout).

Sooo… I made my own simple library called SpriteFactory.

Here’s some example usage:

var factory:SpriteFactory = new SpriteFactory("assets/sprites");
factory.loadBitmap("grass", "block-grass.png");
var grass1:Sprite = factory.newSprite("grass");
var grass2:Sprite = factory.newSprite("grass");

Check out the project page for more information.

As I’ve made up my mind to learn Flash, and don’t want to pay a honkin’ amount of cash, I decided to go with a free Flash IDE called FlashDevelop.

Since I’m toying around with the idea of sidescrollers, I did a search for “Flash sidescroller tutorial” and found this excellent 3-parter by devnote.org.  Unfortunately (for me), the tutorial expects that you’re using Adobe’s Flash IDE.  Thus, as a contribution to the web (and myself… mostly myself), I translated the tutorial to work with FlashDevelop.  Read on to see how I did it, or just grab the source here.

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As some of you may know, I’m a co-founder of the indie games company Couchware Inc. About a month ago, we released Wezzle, our first title. A few days ago we released a free web version of the game called Wezzle for Web (which you should try out! ).

As if there wasn’t already enough Wezzle awesomeness going around, we just reduced the price of the game to $4.99 (from $14.99). So, if you haven’t yet grabbed a copy of Wezzle, I highly recommend you do it now.

For those of you unfamiliar with Wezzle, it’s a casual puzzler that features four unique items, 3 difficulty modes, 10 original songs and eye-poppingly colourful graphics.

If you’ve ever needed to do more complex animations than fades and slides, then you’ve probably encountered the jQuery animate function. The animate function allows you quite a bit more flexibility than just using fadeOut or slideDown. In fact, the oft-used fades and slides simply wrap calls to animate.

If you’ve ever looked at the jQuery animate docs at api.jquery.com you might have noticed that one of the optional arguments you can define is step which is defined as:

A function to be called after each step of the animation.

…and that’s it. If you search for “step” on the page, you won’t see another mention of it.

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Final Fantasy, a.k.a. FF1, is an NES RPG first published in Japan in 1987 and then in North America 3 years later.  I remember when I first played it as a kid at my friend Dave’s house.  It blew my mind.  I would dream about Fighters and Red Mages and making the orbs shine again.

Recently, FF1 was released on the Wii Virtual Console and, even though I already owned it on my NES, I felt the urge to play the classic again without the fear of my NES crashing because I blinked too hard.

So I flipped on my Wii, downloaded the game, and played it for about 2-3 hours a night for a week (keep in mind I logged many, many hours playing this game as a child).  Here are my thoughts on the title.

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I just added a new Fep section. I’m going to try to work on a bit more (just ordered this sucker) as making a programming language has been something I’ve always had an interest in.

First stop: parsers!

During a recent project of mine, I had to do a lot of enum manipulation using the .NET Enum class and I have to say I wasn’t impressed. Besides the shortcoming of it not being a generic class (and thus not being especially type-safe), Enum also has some strange inconsistencies in terms of how it handles matched integral types.

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Here are some Wezzle screenshots from the latest beta.

As I was working on the PHP classes that Fep was to map to, I realized that it was rather silly for me to re-invent an API for lists since there were already many well-designed ones in existence. In particular, I’ve found that the .NET 3.5 collections API to be particularly nice to use. Moreover, since everyone and their dog and using .NET now, it would also be familiar to most programmers. Thus, I’ve decided to use a subset of the .NET collections API for Fep collections.

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Disclaimer: This is not the way Fep arrays will work. Refer to the new article on Fep collections for more information.

In this article, I’ll write a bit about how I think Fep arrays will look. Keep in mind this a work in progress and is by no means comprehensive. Without further ado…

In PHP, you define an array using the array() construct. Fep will follow the lead of languages like JavaScript, Python, Ruby and Groovy and use the square bracket [] notation.

Initialization

For example, a simple array in PHP is creating like this:

$arr = array(1, 2, 3);

In Fep, this would be done like this:

arr = [1, 2, 3]

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