The first is Thingdom, an edu-game for the Science Museum to support the new Who Am I? gallery. The project uses some nifty Box2D physics based characters and is designed to teach how genetics works through playing mating games.

Create yourself a Thing here.

You can read a full case study here.

Secondly, we’ve worked on a series of 4 games for Channel4 as part of the SuperMe project. Developing 4 completely different games at the same time proved to be an interesting challenge, and we learnt a lot in the process.

Proximity is a co-operative multi player racing game, and it’s going to be interesting seeing how it goes down out in the wild. Flomo is a simple, yet fiendish platform game with some heavy lifting using the Flash Player 10 drawing API to make it pretty. Swerveball is a physics based puzzler and Linkem is a puzzle game in the vein of Bejewelled / Drop7 involving clearing rows and lines.

All the games are playable here.

I’ve used an iPhone for over a year and have now been running an HTC Desire for about 3 weeks. I’m not going to compare the phones or OS directly, just my first impressions of developing for the Android platform as compared to my dalliance with iOS. I’m learning both and currently developing 2 apps, with the aim of releasing a version of each on both platforms.

The development IDE of choice is Eclipse. Which I am very familiar with as I spend a good chunk of my day in FDT. Google provide Android Developer Tools (ADT) as a free plug-in, and this coupled with the SDK gives you everything you need to get started. It’s very simple and I was up and running with a  HelloWorld example running both in the emulator and on device within minutes (the ease at which you can get a build up and running on device is particularly impressive).

The language is Java, I’m not a Java developer, but I do know my way around Actionscript, and with some patience and the odd check of a reference book, this is an easy step because generally the syntax is very similar. There are limitless Java resources, both free and paid for, kicking around, so it’s pretty easy to pick up. Java may be an easier language to get to grips with for a flash dev, but Objective-C is fairly straightforward once you get your head around its foibles, and potentially more powerful, so overall in terms of environment, I’m going to call this even.

Fragmented hardware is an issue. Something that was apparent as soon as I started my first Android app was that there is a lot more to take into consideration as regards hardware than when dealing with iOS. Touch screen or keypad input (the very first thing I did was port the ‘snake on a phone’ example app to take touch input for control, as the included version relied on a keyboard) screen dimensions and size etc.

This wasn’t an issue with iOS until very recently, and even then it is safe to assume that the iPad and iPhone4 are unlikely to change for at least another year. Future-proofing your apps for the Android platform requires more thought, development time and planning. It also means you need to have hardware for every device you wish to support when testing, and this can be expensive.

The Android Marketplace need improvement. I don’t necessarily like it, but the restrictions on content that Apple force apps to abide by, do make for a better store. There is a lot of crap, including some apps that blatantly breach copyright, in the Android marketplace, and I think that damages the reputation of the store, which is good for no-one.

This may have something to do with why iPhone users download more apps (ergo, spend more money on them) than Android users do, but that could also be a product of the massive marketing push from Apple. A lot of info on the stores and app usage etc can be found over at AdMob’s Metrics, makes for interesting reading if you are planning on building and selling a new application.

As a developer, the freedom of the Android platform is very appealing. No long winded black box Apple admission, where your app can disappear into the cupertino hole for months on end. You sign up, get your keys and publish right into the marketplace. There is an interesting set of data available from Appcelerator – from a developer survey especially relevant, and this fits with my own view, is the fact that in the short term, most developers see iOS as where the money is, but in the long term, favour Android’s ability to come through.

For now I think it is very wise to keep abreast of developments with both platforms.

I was in charge of the GUI and Facebook integration, and overall project structure. The project is built around a custom implementation of PureMVC, with the game engine (developed by the awesome Luke at Preloaded) making use of Red5 and Box2D.

This is the first time we’ve fully integrated Facebook into a Flash application and it was not without it’s headaches. The Facebook API is an unwieldy beast and the implementation forces a long callback chain for simple events like logging in that is liable to fall over fairly frequently. It feels very much like an unfinished product. Still, it will be interesting to compare with 1066 play stats and see if integrating FB is worth the headaches.

Check out Trafalgar – Origins here.

The vis is about the various purported health benefits of the health supplements on offer, their popularity and their effectiveness at actually helping. The vis was a real challenge to develop, as my first data vis piece I learnt a lot from it. Making something that is both attractive, intuitive and useful is sadly something that rarely happens in the day to day world of flash development, often we get to aim for two of the three, rarely all of them.

Hopefully this will be the first of many of these kinds of projects for me, it’s something I really enjoy.

Check it out here.

Update: Myths was singled out by the BBC as one of only 5 projects out of the entire BBC Digital output for the year to be showcased at MiPTV, and has just been nominated for a Welsh Bafta in the ‘Best Interactive’ category.

You can see all 4 stories and games here.

Flash projects come in many guises, and what tools you use on one may be unsuitable for another, so instead, I’m going to list and explain my personal choices, hopefully if you are new to Flash, or venturing out of the Flash IDE and looking for a more substantial development environment, you’ll find this useful…

First, lets get this out of the way… Mac or PC? (I’m not going to go into linux here – I haven’t used it for flash development, and I’m not convinced anyone sane would)

I use a Mac. I haven’t used a Windows box for around 3 years. Initially this wasn’t a choice, I was given a Mac to work on in a new job and after 2 weeks realised I’d never go back. Other people have a different opinion. The rest of this post is relating to Mac based development but most tools are available for both platforms.

So, to the specific tools. Firstly, the basics, you are going to need some portion of Adobe’s Creative Suite, at the minimum Flash, but in all likelihood, at least Photoshop and Illustrator as well… I’m lucky enough to have been bought the Master Edition and (since the latest updates at least) all seems well and I’m finding myself becoming familiar with Soundbooth, Premier (not so good), After Effects etc as well. It’s unfortunate that Adobe seem to have a monopoly on these products, but whilst I have some minor gripes with CS4, overall it’s not a bad suite of software at all.

So far so good. Now to your coding setup.

On the Mac you have 2 decent, if subtly different options. FlexBuilder 3 (soon to be FlashBuilder 4) and FDT – Flash Development Tool. There are a few different versions of FDT, with increased features the more you spend, I’d say the Professional level edition is the minimum for serious development, and Enterprise being optimal if you can afford it (you’ll get proper support), although all the crucial features are included in the Pure or Basic editions. (If you work on an a PC, and are interested in a free option, check out FlashDevelop I’ve not personally used it, but have heard some good things).

I’m still evaluating the FlashBuilder Beta and while it has taken on some of the features (the change of name is clearly a change of intent, not just a rebranding) of FDT, browse SWC’s in the file explorer for instance, I feel that in terms of quality of the actual code editor FDT is still the best option, FlashBuilder still has to wait for a save before any problem highlighting which just seems clunky and irritating and it’s slower to compile than FDT. That said, FDT’s implementation of an MXML editor isn’t usable yet, and if its Flex or AIR that you are developing for, then its FlashBuilder you need.

Both products are available as standalone applications, or as Eclipse IDE plugins. Which you choose to use is up to you, I use FDT as a plugin and FlashBuilder as a standalone. Mainly because I once tried to install FlexBuilder as a plugin, and had all manner of problems making it play nice. This may well not be an issue for others.

There are two other fundamental tools I use every day, both as plugins to my Eclipse environment.

First up… Aptana, fundamentally it is a frontend web development suite, available in both a standalone application or Eclipse plugin. It makes for easy XML / CSS creation and editing without leaving Eclipse. It is vastly more powerful than I need really but since installing it a few months ago, I’ve used it every day in some form or another. There are other tools out there that do the same job, and are probably a bit simpler, but its a very useful edition to my workflow.

This leaves Subclipse. I’ve used several separate applications to manage my subversion repositories but since switching to an integrated solution, I’ll not go back. Put simply, Subclipse pushes the handling of SVN directly into the Flash Explorer of FDT / FlashBuilder. All commits, updates and merges can be handled from right inside your development IDE. On top of the obvious efficiency benefits with this approach, it is the best client I have used in terms of not b0rking repositories, and when one does inevitably get “a little confused”, makes it much easier to untangle it than with say, Versions. I haven’t had to recursively delete .svn folders and go through messy move / copy procedures for a long time… If you are so inclined, it also allows you to create local repositories; powerful stuff.

So, to summarise, the perfect flash development environment* is, pretty simple actually:

• Adobe Creative Suite
• Eclipse IDE (plugins: FDT, Aptana, Subclipse)

and if you are planning on working on Flex or AIR bits, you’ll need Flex/FlashBuilder.

I should point out that FDT is more expensive than FlashBuilder, and it is perfectly possible to have a very usable environment in FlashBuilder, its just that, if you can afford it, or get your company to buy it for you, in my opinion, FDT is eventually where you’ll end up spending more time if you are writing pure AS.

*may or may not be true depending on your point of view

Unfortunately this app has now been pulled down. Ah well, that’s what you get for making internet things.

Go check it out here.

View the site here.