Hey there

The blog is online again. Have been lazy in keeping it up and running and though google page rank might not like me for it, I don’t think anyone got hurt. Anyway, two blog posts got lost. The first being a “I’m taking a break” message and the second one being a guest post by Doidel, a member of bbgamezone.net.

From now on I will occasionally update the blog with new content and I’m going to take a little more care of it.

Here is the post by Doidel again so you don’t have to miss out on his little tutorial:

Creating Spells with Photoshop

Many browsergame developers sooner or later come to the point where they must create spell graphics, may they be for attack, defense or buffing teammates. So did I, and my chosen tool turned out to be Photoshop 7, an old yet adequate version for a beginner. Though no knowledge of painting nor using Photoshop you’ll be able to create two spells alike mine within less than 3 hours. Just follow these four steps:

- Run through this tutorial (10 min)
- And run through this tutorial too (10 min)
- Read this in order to use “Lens Flare” with transparent backgrounds (5 min)
- Create your own spells (1 hour per spell in my case)
- Check that your image has a transparent background, then click “File – Save for Web” and choose “PNG-24″ from the format list. This will save your image with a transparent background (By now, all modern browsers display PNGs correctly).

How to create an animated spell for my browsergame?

The basic idea is quite simple:

Either…
With javascript, preload all spell frames (A frame is a single image in this case, played one by another they become an animation) and iterate through them. These pictures will be displayed as a series for the user, and still you have a PNGs quality and transparency. It is recommended to use “Sprites” in this case, i.e. having the frame series within one picture. Use the css background-position property to iterate through the frames.

Or…
Use a javascript framework (e.g. jquery or mootools) and use the Fx libraries. With them you can move objects around, let them fade, resize them and much more.

All the best
Doidel

Have you seen the news today? Anything about politics? Anything about Muslim extremists? I saw the news today. I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw people, both male and female, talk in riddles and ask the same questions over and over again without listening to the answer. Those people, politicians, Muslim extremists, anti-Muslim extremists, journalists, … They didn’t care about who they were talking to. They didn’t care for the answer. They didn’t care for the message. The didn’t care about building something valuable with the person they were speaking to. They only cared about making a point.

Read more…

I justed checked in to TED talks to get my weekly portion of awesomeness. You just have to see this.

There’s much to think about here. Instead of sharing my own thoughts on the subject though, I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions. Please leave a comment with your thoughts!

Just a lil’ something of my own, Summary:
1. We need to create more games that engage players to change the real world.
2. How are we going to do this? How do we create that ‘link’ between the real world and a virtual world?
3. How can we get the most out of it? How can we step our game up from experiment to full-powered life-skill-teaching game?

One of my concerns lately is the quality of new browser games (facebook, Evony, …). I’m afraid that money will always be more important than good education…

It is an important question for all PBBG developers. The answer can show us where we want to go or give us insight in how we create our own games. It can remind us what our goal is, an image we should always keep in our minds.

Goals and motivations can differ from one person to another. Knowing where we stand is important though. That’s why I asked 9 developers to answer the following questions:

1. Why did you originally want to make browser based games?
2. Why did you choose browser based games over other media?
3. Why do you make browser based games now?
4. Why do you still make browser based games, instead of going to other media?
5. Why should, or shouldn’t, people play browser based games?

This was not a scientific survey or anything like that but rather a glimpse of the minds of some fellow developers. Some of them already have games online for quite a while, others are still creating their first PBBG.

Maybe their answers, and my view, can help you to answer those questions for yourself.

Read more…

I am very happy to announce to you a new service to bring PBBG developers closer together, PBBG snippets!

This was a collaborative project between BBGameDesign and Building Browsergames. Visit bbgames for a little bit more info.

If you have anything to share, contributing is easy, so don’t hesitate!

Visit PBBG Snippets