If you've got kids they might enjoy this. kidthing has spent about a month working on 25 daily games+animations+activities for a cool digital advent calendar. The games have beautiful design, run full screen at 800x600, good holiday music. Being an advent calendar, one new activity opens up every day until Christmas. While we were going to sell it, with everybody in bad financial times, senior ups decided on giving it away for free!! Click here to find out more It won't be available past Dec31st.
As a case study: as the leader of the interactive team, it's been an interesting challenge, basically trying to integrate 25 full blown casual games into a larger cohesive experience, in a way they don't conflict with each other (no static instances, making sure to clean up after movies are removed...(I miss unloadMovie). In particular stopping movies, sounds, removing events so they can be garbage collected. Also sharing the keyboard, mouse, and restoring the mouse cursor when special effects were being used. It turned out that we needed to add a consistent close button and with 25 games and a myriad of layouts finding room for it was tricky.
The other interesting challenge with AS3 has been relearning how to make highly skinnable games. Since the ones skinning it were mostly designers animators with very light programming on Mac and the programmers were on windows (fonts don't always work cross platform) We ended up figuring out ways to separate all the engines into separate swfs and join them up at run time. Very handy, DLL like use of swfs.
We created a prototype early on. Originally were were planning on putting everything into one monolithic movie, but it came clear that most products were still getting final touches until the final hours. In someways choosing this approach of multiple files was also safer, I've had a history of complex projects with Flash, and the number of things that can go wrong grows with the size of the Fla. If nothing else it's faster to publish smaller files than bigger files...especially when pulling from a bunch of fonts. Worse is when something (typically a bitmap) corrupts the Fla and this can take hours to track down and fix.
Several of the products have printable activities, for reasons not clear to me, getting the layout right in Printing in flash is sort of a black art. Fonts was another headache(s). Which I just covered several times .
By the way created a tutorial on the popular snow effect if you are interested in AS3.0
http://troyworks.com/blog/2008/11/26/flash-kirupa-snow-in-as30/
Let me know what you think, and happy holidays!
