How to install Ruby 1.8.7 on windows
It happens that Ruby 1.8.7 is recommended for the current Rails version but there is no one-click installer available for windows the time being. Not a problem, just follow the few steps below…
Poor small duck...
I put this image up to my deviantart account the other day and it really turned out pretty much the way I wanted it to… so I’m adding it here, too.
“Just a frog”
I got the inspiration for this while playing with my son building a lego-duck for him, only using two bricks(like in the picture above). That felt very abstract to me and I wondered how to build a frog the most abstract way, and my solution was: use a single piece of green lego.
That made me wonder, whether the abstract characters from a low-res pixel world are able to recognize each other…
Hope you like it :)
My tribute to April O' Neil
You rock, April!
I’ve never really liked the stile of the traditional cartoon April, but I love the touch the cg movie TMNT gave her. She became a fighter herself and I love the overall design. Is it really only me that liked the latest TMNT movie? It pretty much sucked here in germany and when I went to cinema to see it the woman at the checkout called through a mirophone “room 5, turtles please” cause we were the only ones going to see it and they had to run it just for us ;)
What do you think of the movie? I can’t be the only one who thought it was great!
Oh yes – the picture: I always wanted to try my take on April, hope you like it! Comments and feedback would be really appreciated. If you like it, please share!
(click at the images to enlarge:)
You can also find the image at my deviantart account.
Merry christmas, ye scurvy pirates!
I wish you all the best for Christmas!
I’m somewhat busy at the moment doing ‘personal stuff’, but after the Christmas holidays I’ll continue working at my next flash game. It’s pretty hard to find the time for it, cause it’s usually not more than 1 hour per day after work, and on weekends usually 0 hours/day.
My next game will be some sort of fun addicting endless-game where the gameplay keeps getting faster and harder the longer you play till you finally screw up. That is because it took forever to build the few levels in Pirate Golf Adventure and I often hear people complaining that it’s too short. So I will go for the “not-so-unique-levels-but-much-more-of-them” way. Hope you like it more this time ;)
So have a great time!
ps: If you don’t know why the giant bird seems so surprised: ‘just wonders where caribo got the presents from while sitting on his back ;)
You're better than me - and you show it at youtube
There are some people who complain that the last achievement at Pirate Golf Adventure is too hard to get. And you know what? They’re right, it’s damn hard. Even I have trouble getting it, although I played the game like a million times times. I only did the 25 strokes twice!
But there’s a reason I did it that hard: I knew, that there will be lots of people much better at my very own game than I am. And that turned out to be true. See some video proof of it in the post!
Finally new content at my homepage
Now that my old homepage hasn’t seen any update since a year or so I finally decided that it’s time for some static content that won’t need any updates at all.
What came out is now my own private web business cart. Pure static content, displaying some links to other sites I’m subscribed to. So one less that needs updates…
What do you think? Check it out at dennistreder.de
Great flash animation books
The following books really helped me to get insights in animating with flash and industry-proven methods to get your animation work done. I’d like to post more book tips and links in the future to show you what I really think is worth buying. I own each of the books I’ll recommend here myself, so it’s not a dumb amazon-link rubbish but books that I think are truly great.
How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS4
I was sceptical about this one at first, but it turned out to give me some of the most valuable tips on constructing vector graphics within flash and getting the best out of gradients and texture-fills. It’s really industry proven as most examples come from real commissions and shows you how to achieve good results in little time.
Foundation Flash Cartoon Animation
... shows you a more traditional approach on animation and how you can handle it within the Flash IDE. Great tips ons structuring your movieclips with all the characters different angles, states, expressions, ... that helps a lot to not lose track of your library.
If you know any good flash book that’s worth taking a look at please tell me, I’m eager to check it out!
A little help with event listeners...
Let me show you a simple AS3 structure that helps me to keep track of my event listeners and prevents me from messing up my code. Nothing groundbreaking but it always made my code a little clearer and puts everything regarding the listeners in one place.
Moonship - I'm going to finish this one somewhen!
Moonship is a picture I started drawing nearly a year ago – while trying to figure out the direction pirategolf should take. I never really finished it but now that found it again on my harddrive I think it works quite well and I’m going to finish it somewhen in the future…
ALWAYS do a border clip around you swiffs!
Let’s first make clear what I’m talking about:
- swiff is what the web says ”.swf” files are called – and ”.swf” files are compiled flash files.
- A border clip is a Movieclip (or display object of any kind) at the top most layer of your flash stage that leaves the normal visible area of you game visible, but adds a large border around it that hides everything outside.
- always means always!
So the problem is that if you embed your swiff into a website and the embedding container has a larger size than your game resolution, everything outside is also visible, like you can see here (click it!):
(that’s from xhry.cz)
It’s not that I haven’t been aware of this before… I already knew it. But let’s say I simply forgot about it, or maybe I thought “the flashgame portals will for sure use the correct dimension for embedding…”. Now the game is out there on more than 1000 different servers and there are more than just a few that use a larger dimention (e.g. even AddictingGames does, and that’s really painful). Don’t take this too easy, it really kills the ratings!
So please learn from my stupidity and make a border around your flash content. Period.
Pirate golf just out for a week...
My new (and first) game pirategolf is now out in the wild for about a week. About statistics addiction, evil feedback and unfulfilled plans…
"Pirate Golf Adventure" launching tomorrow :)
OK, maybe I’m a little over excited, but this is the very first flashgame I did, so I guess I’m allowed to…
I just saw (the test version of) the game integrated in my sponsors (King.com) site, and I’m really looking forward to the launch tomorrow!
And when the game has finally been published I plan to do some blog entries about making the game, showing concept sketches and giving some insights in how the courses were created, if there’s anybody interested in it ;)
Congratulations gnomgames!
The cool young german gaming site Gnomgames just published put their 1000s article!
Pirate flash game now final beta!
Pirate Golf Adventure – the flash game I’ve been working on for so long is now final beta! The “private” beta phase really made the game soooo much better! Thank you all for your great feedback! Check out the final beta!
<- click at the image to play the game
or maybe view some screenshots first ;)
Flash font embedding tutorial - this is how it really works
There are a lot of tutorials online to tell us how font embedding works. Sadly most of them are incomplete and leave you alone with missing characters, bolds and italics and the question how to use font embedding for all your Textfields without always embed all the characters again.
This tutorial shows you how you get your fonts embedded properly.
Amazing level endings - learn from Sonic, Mario and Co.
Do you remember that there was something special about the way the old Sonic and Mario games ended their levels and bossfights? Something that made you feel good, feel satisfied – and that seems almost forgotten today…
Let’s find out what it is, why it works and what we can learn from it!
Little Pirate
This concept was drawn on a Nintendo DS using the fantastic homeprew “colors”. This entry features an animation showing how the little guy was drawn plus a wallpaper I generated afterwards on the pc.
Under construction
Hello everybody,
this website is currently under construction. I’ll adjust the site-template and do some minor modifications on the framework, then I’ll be ready to start blogging…
The blogs will be about games, game reviews, game development, flash development and some graphical issues.
So please stay tuned till everything starts.
Cheers, Dennis
