Here’s the second part of the tutorial. It covers how to import images from a program like Photoshop into Multimedia Fusion.

I just finished up my first video tutorial ever. I always wanted to make one. I think it turned out ok. The tutorial goes through using Graphics within Multimedia Fusion, but in the second part I start using Photoshop and explain how to then import images into Multimedia Fusion.

Let me know what you think in the comments, and some constructive criticism is always welcome.

Hey, just to promote the club I’m leading this term. The UWWD club is held 4:30-6:00pm on Thursdays in DP 329 (Flex Lab). It’s my first leading the UW Web-Designers club and I thought I’d make some slight changes to the way the club is run. Instead of getting straight into web-design as before I tought I’d design a tutorial series for web-design.

So here are our 30min Tutorial Sessions for the weeks to come. They’re going to be held at the beginning of the meeting. After that we’ll continue to work on Websites requested by clubs.

Intro to Web-design Series
Photoshop CS:  Jan. 05th, 2009
HTML and CSS: Jan. 12th, 2009
PHP + MySQL:  Jan. 26th, 2009

Additional Tutorials
Creating a Wordpress Theme: March 05th, 2009
Hello Flash Actionscript:         March 12th, 2009
20min Pong in Flash:               March 19th, 2009

So I hope to see you at the meetings.

What makes a game a seller or just plain popular? Some games such as Sock and Awe become popular overnight. Finding something viral, can turn any seemingly stupid idea into a goldmine. On the other hand there are games which reach the top for what they are worth. With 2,231,434 plays ‘Bloons Tower Defense 3’, is the 3rd most popular game on Kongregate.com, the Youtube of web-based casual games. Bloons was created by NinjaKiwi.

Genre Background

Bloons is a tower defense game. The tower defense game genre originated in the 90s in an arcade game called Rampart. That idea re-appeared 8 years later in a user created map for Starcraft, then Age of Empires II, and Warcraft III whereby the gameplay was adopted to fit new design tools.

Gameplay

The concept of Bloons Tower Defense is just as simple as the classic Tower Defense games. To make it adoptable to the casual gamer, you can choose from 3 difficulties; Easy, Medium and Hard. There’s also an in-game tutorial to aid a beginner through the basics of the game. The main aim of any TD game is to make sure that none of the enemies (in this case balloons) get through to the other side. Balloons come in waves, and one wave is considered one level. More sophisticated enemies appear and the bounty earned to kill those increases as the next stage begins. In Bloons, you choose to trigger the next stage. Before you trigger the next stage you are encouraged to improve your defences and build new types of defences. For replay-ability, you can select new maps to play on and unlock some new ones as well.

Graphics

Although the graphics are simplistic, they are very appealing. The success with Bloons, and other 2D arcade games shows, that you don’t need to utilize 3d visuals to gain someone’s attention. As Leonardo da Vinci said “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” As you can see from the image below, both the interface and graphics are simplistic in nature:

In the end the main thing that a game needs to have, to be entertaining, is be easy, but not too easy. That’s why most casual games have a difficulty throttle. It needs to be easy to learn, and that’s why there’s a build in tutorial which goes through the basics as you play the game. A game which includes some of these elements, may end up the next popular game.

Here’s an awesome event coming up at UW.

Flash is awesome for a lot of things. The important thing though, is that many Internet users have it installed already, and to view Flash content requires no further installation. Without Flash, YouTube wouldn’t exist. Here is my first tutorial on getting into Flash Actionscript. Like with any programming language, I’ll start with a simple ‘Hello World’ tutorial.

Open Adobe Flash, and create a new file. Choose the Text tool and draw a textbox in the middle of the screen. Make sure the Properties window is showing. If not select ‘Window’, ‘Properties’ from the menu. For the textbox type (drop-down) make sure ‘dynamic text’ is selected. Dynamic text can be changed via Actionscript but cannot be changed by user-input. In the <instance name> field type greeting

Now, create a new layer by selecting ‘Insert’, ‘Timeline’, ‘Layer’ from the menu. Rename the layer to actions and drag it to the top of the layer list. In the actions panel, input the code below. To open the actions panel select ‘Window’, ‘Actions’ from the menu.

// useful for debugging purposes
trace("Hello World");
// sets the textbox with the instance name of greeting to the specified string.
// _root references the stage
// .text accesses the text property of the textbox.
_root.greeting.text = "Hello World!";

To run your first Actionscript Program, select ‘File’, ‘Publish Preview’, ‘Flash’ from the menu.
Thats it.

Here’s something I came across on the Flashkit board. Germany is big on Conferences, and of the top 150 conferences, 100 are held in Germany. Well a Casual Games conference called Casual Connect is being held in February. You can read more about whose coming at: http://europe.casualconnect.org/content.html

I edited the video a bit more by adding in credits and sound.
Plot: Someone stole Ambo the Bears’ honey, and now he’s out to get his honey back.
An animation based of my original drawing, yet animated by master animator Charles Zhang.

What do I mean? Well if you buy a domain name out of impulse, then you might be addicted. Buying 10 domain names in less than a year is another sign that you might be addicted. If you bought a domain like takeasniff.com, just so that you could reference it, in fine print, within your arts project, then you truely are addicted. Hi, my name is Ivan and I’m a domain-buy-a-holic. Well, what’s so addicting about it? Buying Domains is like buying property in some ways; but in other ways it is worse. With each domain name bought, the quality of the remaining names deteriates due to the fact that shorter names are now taken. It is a huge market as can be seen on eBay. The owner of pizza.com was paid $2,000,000 for the name alone. That is ridiculus because all it is, is a substitute for an IP address and only one variable needs to be changed to link the name server to the web server. My addiction sprung up due to fact that I lost a good domain name to someone else. That name was aditin.com planned for an in-game ad network.

I updated my original snakes drawing function and redesigned the user interface. See the result below.
All you need is a mouse and some skill. Avoid the red squares, and collect the food to grow your snake.
Play the game after the jump.
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