Animated Particles, Books, and Code – It’s a New Year

by Devon O.· January 01, 2014· in Actionscript, Flash, Life· 3 comments tags: particles, starling
2014 It doesn’t even sound real. Like an unreachable year in an 80’s sci-fi b movie. And yet, for better or worse, here we are. Seems my last post was quite some time ago (I think WordPress has had 16 releases since then) and a bit negative (bug report), so it’s time to start the new year off right. Animated Particles First on the agenda is something I’ve been meaning to do for awhile, but just never got the time until this Christmas/New Year’s holiday. Now, I really love the Starling particle extension. I mean, hell, who doesn’t love particles? But I always thought it would be nice if the particles could be animated (think flocks of flying birds or schools of swimming fish), so I sat down and added the possibility. First, the downside. I was hoping I could simply extend the current Starling particle extension and tweak it a bit. In theory this would be possible. Unfortunately, in practice, the properties and methods that needed tweaking were private class members. So, unfortunately, I had to basically duplicate a good deal of the code. First I just copied ParticleSystem.as into a new class named OpenParticleSystem and set the private […]
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So Long and Thanks for all the Flash on the Beach

by Devon O.· September 17, 2011· in Flash, Life· 2 comments tags: flash on the beach, fotb
So, another Flash on the Beach has just has just drawn to a close and, as was announced by John Davey, the head Ringmaster of the fantastic circus that is Flash on the Beach, 2011’s is most likely the last FOTB ever. Not to worry though, Mr. Davey is looking at replacing it with something more technology agnostic, as FOTB has slowly been moving towards anyway. My guess is that around this time next year there will be a Geeky by Nature, Brighton event taking place at the Dome – but that’s only a guess. The ironic part is, this year the most popular sessions (at least from this Flash dev’s point of view) were those revolving around Flash. Several were so packed that people were turned away at the door. I know that I, myself, wasn’t able to get in to see Rob Bateman’s session which really ticked me off at the moment, but it was rumored that well over a hundred folks were prevented from seeing Eugene Zatepyakin which is really a damn shame, but just shows you that people are indeed still interested in Flash. The event itself though… Strange one this year. Seems a bit of the normal funding […]
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Game Development Tips from the Trenches of PopCap

by Devon O.· August 01, 2011· in Flash, Games, Life· 5 comments
Well, this is a post that’s a bit overdue, but, thanks to a well timed bank holiday, I finally had the opportunity to sit down and type up what I’ve been meaning to for some time now… Before digging straight into the game a team and I have been assigned to build at my new job with PopCap, the powers that be thought it best I first have a sit down with other Flash developers in the company and learn from their suggestions, experiences, mistakes, and successes. So, after surviving the 20 some hour journey from the Dublin office to PopCap HQ in Seattle, Washington, I had the pleasure to sit down with the likes of Max Anderson (I mention his name as he spoke at AdobeMAX in 2010 and a few of you may be familiar with him) and the creators / maintainers of the fantastic PopCap online games Bejeweled Blitz,  Zuma Blitz, and Pig Up! Although much of what was discussed was company specific, what follows is a few of the juicier and more generic (so generic, in fact, they can really apply to any development environment, not just Flash) words of wisdom I picked up during my […]
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Making The Gaming Scene (A Change in Careers)

by Devon O.· May 29, 2011· in Flash, Life· 6 comments
And for my second blog post of the day, a much more personal note. After about three years of working with, what I would consider as objectively as possible, the best digital agency in Ireland, vStream Digital Media, I have made the immense career decision to leave the agency world and enter the arena of Flash Platform gaming. So, beginning tomorrow, I am taking on the role of Senior Flash Engineer at PopCap Games, International. This will be both an incredible and incredibly challenging position and, as nervous as I might be at the change and as much as I will definitely miss my former coworkers and bosses, I am extremely excited and cannot wait to dive in. This certainly wasn’t a decision I came to lightly; there were many factors to weigh over. Over my 11 or 12 or so years of being a “Flash guy”, I never once considered myself a game developer, even on those odd occasions when I was developing games. I have always considered myself more of an application developer, whether those applications were websites, desktop applications, Facebook applications, mobile applications, or, well, games. Being a game developer requires a whole new paradigm. While not […]
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Adventures in Playbook Land

by Devon O.· April 09, 2011· in Life· 9 comments tags: blackberry, playbook
Now that the ordeal is over, I thought I’d take the time to sit down and share my account of what it was like to develop a Blackberry Playbook application using the Adobe Flex SDK. Like many other Actionscript developers out there, when I heard that RIM was giving away free Playbooks to developers who had an app published by the end of March, which was eventually accepted, I thought, wow, what a great opportunity – this should be a piece of cake and a learning experience. A learning experience it was. A piece of cake, it wasn’t. I won’t bore you by starting from the very beginning. This has already been covered quite eloquently and humorously enough by Jamie Murai here. Suffice it to say that I, and I’m sure most everyone else developing a Playbook app for the first time, went through a nearly identical experience. At the point I begin my story I have a simple game built (this was actually the easy part), the annoyingly VMWare powered simulator is installed and running nicely, and, thanks to studio|chris and fruitbat, I even have a way to easily install and uninstall my game to and from the simulator […]
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Devon O. Wolfgang

AIR | Unity3D | AR/VR

Unity Certified Developer

Technical Reviewer of “The Essential Guide to Flash CS4 AIR Development” and “Starling Game Development Essentials”

Reviewer of “The Starling Handbook”

Unity Engineer at Touch Press.

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