We're in the lucky position of having more than enough work for ourselves, so we're looking to share that out by taking on a freelance coder for initially one project, due to start in the next couple of weeks.

Ideally you'll tick most of the boxes below, and if so please give us a shout via the contact page on the site ( We're more than happy to answer any questions in the comments, but if anyone feels the need to post "mail sent" they won't ever ever be working with us. Ever ).

* Young and eager. We've not got the budget on this project to pay out London day rates, but it'll be more than than an average sponsorship deal. Think of it as a way into the industry rather than a quick [ Huge ] buck. We want someone who's on fucking fire to make the best games possible. We want your enthusiasm to make us feel old and cynical in comparison.

* Available. If I'm being chased up by the client, then I need to be able to get in touch with you. Fitting this in and around your life isn't really an option, it's a job and needs treating as such. Once you've done your 8 hours and everything is on target you can go out and kill prostitutes for all I care, we just need your arse for that time every day.
( We don't care about location / time zone differences, I really just need to be able to fire up msn and see your lovely avatar there at set times ).

* Ability. as3 is a must, and oop as3 at that. We want to see lovely external classes. Flex or Flash Develop will be your dev. environments of choice. We don't expect you to know everything, it's more about a keenness to try and work around problems on your own than a vast knowledge of everything under the sun.
Also at least one complete game under your belt is a must. By complete, we don't count "It's all finished, I just need to add the sounds and the last couple of levels". That's not a finished game.

* Attention to detail. We're anal to the point of ocd. When doing a game for a big name client you can't get away with "That'll do, it's close enough", everything has to be as close to silky smooth as possible. Hopefully you'll bring that with you, otherwise you're going to get fucked off with us pointing things out. We want your imagination as much as your code.

* Deadlines baby. A missed deadline at best means an annoyed client, at worst an annoyed client and us working for free to catch up. You really need to be self motivated and self managed for the most part. You're not going to be left alone in the wilderness, we'll be there to keep things on track and to provide all the help and support we can, but by the same token we're not going to micro-mange you. Partly because it's no fun for us, and just as importantly it's no fun for you. This will be your chance to shine on a project, to run with it and make us pant to work with you again.

If this sounds like the life for you, then give us a shout, even if you think you only hit some of those requirements, you could still have a ton of potential which just needs to be brought out. And nothing brings out your coding potential like having to get a delivery to a client in 4 hours when you've got 6 hours work to do.

We're looking forward to hearing from you.

Oh and just in case: here's the contact form ...

Squize.

Just a minor update about X++

The final version has been posted to FGL, so if you're a registered developer there with a 1+ rating in each of those different categories that I can't remember ( Market place and the like ) feel free to check it out ( It should be verified in a couple of days ).

We were looking to Kong for a sponsorship but we've not heard anything back, so off to FGL she goes.

It's funny how the last 0.5% of it has dragged on quite so long, but we were both tied up with proper work. I think it's worth the delay though, I'm really proud of it.

Anyway the next post about it should be a link to it's final home, and then we can move onto the next one.

Squize.

That we've started hosting some of our games ?

It's something I started a while back and had to break off from as work / Unity / real life got in the way.

Here's some links:

Chimbo's Quest

MJ-1912

Loved Up

[Update] Virus

There are a lot more to come ( I had a count up the other week, and including the puzzle game that I gave that huge spoiler away with on the last post, I'll have finished 82 games. We won't be able to host all the games 'cause there's a lot that I don't own the copyright too, but there's a fair few we can ).

Also as a historical ego trip I found my first ever Flash game that actually did something. It was my entry for a retro comp on FK.games ( That never amounted to anything, mine was the only entry ) and is a remake of the c64 shooter, Delta ( It uses a "mod player" on the title screen, but due to Flash's sound being broken on Vista it sounds dog rough. My apologies to Rob Hubbard for making his music sound like poo ).
It's just the first 3 levels, doing a really anal accurate port is hellish.

Squize.

ah, back to normal after the rush of doing a semi-useful post.

Just a quick one in case you ever get a,

error 1152: a conflict exists with inherited definition

I'd used the instance name "name" on a dynamic text field on the stage, and the Flex compiler just didn't like any of it, to the point of giving me 14 errors for my trouble.

Simple lamer mistake I know, but if you're here after pulling your hair out with that error it may save you some pain.

Hmmm bit of a geeky post, sorry, we'll get back to our usual brand of swearing and talking crap next post.

Squize.

Trust me, it is.

Carousel

Squize.

As I already mentioned, the Unity docs are not quite what I would call helpfull. I think they cover a lot and most of it will solve your problem, finding the right info in them is what really is the hard part.

Take the GUI scripting guide for instance "Reference Manual > GUI Scripting Guide", this covers everything you need to know to build a GUI. My mission currently is to create a simple form for the game I talked about earlier.
For the salutation I needed a drop down list, so I had to do it on my own, because that's the one usefull control I missed.



The form is dynamic (you can turn of the salutation for instance) and already has a working validation, but it's dead ugly. So the next task was to skin that up ("Reference Manual > GUI Scripting Guide > Customization").

Yet again the manual does a good job to tell you what you can do, but fucking lacks some basic examples on how to deal with the textures to skin up buttons for instance. That's where I got a bit pissy (although I must admit that I hate searching in boards or wikis when the solution should be in the manuals).

So the key to skinning the buttons (and the rest of the UI elements is the GUISkin file or for single use the GUIStyle. I knew that there has been a psd file with "templates" of the default textures used, but alas I still havent been able to find it again, though I know I saw it while playing with Unity for the first day (and I was like wtf?).


I found the most valuable (and yet again MISSED info) in the scripting guide (after just testing it with a basic psd file) ...
So I looked at the default values of a new Skin and saw this:

And I wondered why (and how) it'll become this: .

What the manual is missing badly is the info that you can set a "fixed" border for a texture in a skin that isn't stretched:

var border : RectOffset
Description

The borders of all background images.

This corresponds to the border settings for GUITextures. It only affects the rendering of the background image and has no effect on positioning.

Why do I need to find that out by testing? (I guess no one reads through the scripting guide until he needs a specific info, I for sure do not)

By default the border values are set to:
left: 6, right: 6, top: 6, bottom: 4 ...

After knowing this it was oh so easy to just do this: to get to the buttons used above.

Oh well.

I hope that saves some ugly searching for you,
nGFX

We've made no secret of loving Unity. We cuddle up to it. We watch rom-coms with it and feign interest. Hell, we'd lick it if we could.

But as we've fallen more head over heels it's just highlighted the fact that there's no tried and trusted business model for it yet. There's no mochi, there's no big ass portal wanting to pay for that shiny shiny 3D gameplay, shit there's not even sponsors with their $500 plus source code offers.

The handful of Flash game studios like ourselves who are looking to Unity I assume are following a similar pattern, knock out some nice generic games with some added wow, and then offer it as an alternative [ To Flash ] to clients with the added carrot of an iphone version of the game. So in effect you take a hit on the costs of making the actual game ( Unless you're lucky and can get a decent budget ) but make that back via the iphone version ( One code base, one set of assets, two games to charge for ).

Flashbang have a different idea via their Blurst site, and to be honest it's a real epiphany moment reading about it.

The full article is on the Wall Street Journals site ( Which is quite a wow in itself ) and can be found here.

To cover the key points before you go shooting off over there, the idea is that you have "True fans", the fans who really dig your stuff ( A great article which is linked to in the above article can be found directly here )

"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."

They have calculated that by using a subscription based model they only need 5000 people signing up every six months. That pays for their 6 staff.

In theory that's so simple it's brilliant. Ok it's nothing new, but it's just seeing the maths laid out so simply just makes it feel viable.

We've touched on downloadable versions before, and the general feeling was that very few people will pay for Flash no matter how good it is, because there's just so much free stuff out there and Flash games demographic in terms of indie players seem to be the younger end of the market ( Although that could be skewed due to the younger end of the market being the most vocal ) who
a) Don't have as much disposable income.
b) Have the mindset of "If it's on the net it should be free".
But with Unity your downloadable game can be so much more. Enough to encourage people to subscribe to get it ? Maybe, maybe not. There are more alternatives to just giving a exe version of a game though. Subscribe to gywGames and in our racing game we'll let you design your own livery, and you can take a snapshot which all your friends can see when you're logged on to the site, hell, they can even vote for it.

It's that divergence of media that will sell a subscription. The level editor that's unlocked once you join. That comp to win a psp when you're subscribed. It's allowing players to be that little bit more than players, to let them have a direct effect on the game they're playing, that sense of community. It doesn't have to be heavy handed, it's not all about achievements and gamerscore, it's about putting a little bit of creative power into peoples hands and seeing what they can do.

That to me is the business model for Unity that we've all been searching for.

Squize.

You must have seen that old couple, the ones that look older than time itself and you know they've been together 40+ years. They're eating opposite each other in complete silence as anything new to say has evaporated a long time ago, and it's much easier just to stay silent rather than force something just for the habit of it.

I think the blog has become like that recently. We're in our little ( Tired ? Not yet, not by a long way ) grooves working away on nice things but without much to say about them.

Twitter seems to a better outlet for conveying the day to day little / funny / annoying things and that leaves us with only big things to post here, and right now we're clean out of big things.

The puzzle game I'm working on is coming along nicely. I can't really share the gameplay, and in terms of code, it's a puzzle game. Nothing new or clever there so I can't share some new sweet way of doing things.

We've set our invite only board up too, and I'm struggling to post to that too. Perhaps I have just run out of words of interest. Maybe there are only a certain number and then it's just forced. Like sperm.

If nothing starts happening soon I'll just start posting lies to keep things interesting here, like the time I wrestled a camel. With lazer beam eyes.

Squize.

Hi folks,

most regular readers will have noticed that we've jumped onto the Unity wagon after it finally came out for the windows world and so I think it's time to write down a few of my thoughts ...

What it is:
an easy to use development platform for 3d games (although easy, well, I'll cover that later)

What it is not:
Simply put: easy.
And it is not flash.

So?
The best part of it is, that you can do a decent 3d based game with it quite quickly, that is if you know how to code unity (I might have twittered once or twice that the docs are not one of the strong points) and (what's more important if you or someone in your team) can do low poly 3d.

So?
I really can't stress enough that it is NOT flash, not at all, when you get started with Unity all is nice and straight forward, but once you hit the point where you really would like to do a quick tween for the main menu, or use a fancy drop shadow on your font ... you'll probably start cursing and wish you could use a timeline and some keyframes.

One of the really big letdowns for me was to discover that a quick, easy and nice UI is not going to happen fast in Unity. You can get away with it if you don't need dynamic text to appear, but I need to do a lot of stuff with that, because nearly all of our games are prepared to be played in at least two languages.

How does all that relate to the title?
When I first got in touch with flash (6 I think) AS was really nothing more than a scripting language, coding for the best part was ... shit and most of us messed with onEnterFrames per movielclip. Then AS2 hit the light of the day and with AS3 it came very close to real coding ...
But when I entered the Unity world it seems like the old distributed scripts came back to haunt me. You've got the choice of using a set of different languages: javascript like, c#, boo and some others.

JS on the one hand is easy to use, ridiculously lose typed and commonly used. I really don't like lose typed coding, so for me it was c# ...
Anyway something that commes very close the the old MC based onEnterFrame is Update ... so a script that would move the object 1 "unit" (since we have no pixel) to the left would be:

function Update () {
    transform.position.x++;
}

(or something very close to that, I said I use c#, oh and I'm sure I saw some other methods to do the same)

Save that as a ".js" text file, add that to a cube on stage and viola (there you have the back to script part covered).

I hope you won't be doing that for a complex game, but ... thinking back ... I knew people who did that with flash  ** shudder **.

As I already mentioned, I hate lose typed coding and as I used c# for some years now for coding anyway it was a logical choice (that and the fact that I could continue using Visual Studio).

Oh and did I stress that there is NO timeline?

Everything you want to have animated either needs to be coded (ie for dynamic text) or already be animated in a 3d app ...

Oops, I think I need to get back to work ...

nGFX

ps: just to have something to look at a screenie of the menu (the start of a camera move) of my "test" game to see how I get along with Unity, if everything works well, I might be able to invite for a private beta test on Friday (give me a shout if you want to) ...