Tomato Season has arrived - its time to throw those tomatoes and stomp on them. Don’t worry there needs to be no cost to do so, simply play my newest game: Stomp Tomato.

After a quite long waiting, patience and negotiations it has been done, the game is finally released and will be getting viral to your favorite portals.  The game has been made initially available on the sponsor’s site and on meez.com, then will be uploaded to other major sites as well. Have a meez account? Load your meez avatars anywhere or play it on meez.com to gain some coins and rewards as this game has the Meez Inside API!

Everyone can now play, enjoy, relieve stress, or simply waste your time! So what are you waiting for, play Stomp Tomato now!

Webmasters: If you want this game on your sites, simply grab the goodies here (click at download game).

I’ve been fond of experimenting on things and so this time with what I do and work on most. I’ll try to make some research and test based on what I have made. These posts won’t be recognized as 100% accurate and correct on all situations although I aim to be at the most. See disclaimer before implementing any theories and/or statements described in. So let me start with an quite old issue with disabling external links upon embedding an swf in a web page.

Since flash player 9, site owners were allowed to take use of the additional security. You can control a SWF file’s access to network functionality by setting the allowNetworking parameter in the <object> and <embed> tags in the HTML page that contains the SWF content. It can be included by having:

<object id="sampleswf">
	<param name="movie" value="sample.swf" />
	<param name="allowNetworking" value="internal" />
<embed src="sample.swf" allowNetworking="internal" name="sampleswf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" />
</object>

See your help file about this or view the livedocs (as2 or as3) discussing this added security.

Basically if this ever happens to a flash game, the developer and/or sponsor are neglected of having click backs to their own sites/portals, which is not a good thing. So I made a little research and test if actionscript can determine if allowNetworking was enabled or not. This test will try to determine if external links are allowed, not exactly return the value of the allowNetworking parameter. [more...]

Well, yeah! The results were revealed October 7 and this write up is actually 2 weeks due from it but posting this news is better than never posting it. So yes, I am really grateful that I won the 3rd position in the first MeezInside Contest. If you don’t know about this contest that’s pretty normal, you’re probably not around flashgamelicense.com, to mention that meez has partnered with FGL with this contest. The rules really sound simple, make a game implementing the meez inside API and use the meez avatars. It is actually my first time using an API that actually dynamically loads images (meez avatars) while having security policies in mind and also having to make awesome “tricks” with the limited animation strips rendered. It was a great experience sharing and solving problems, questions and issues with other co-developers who joined the contest and used the API. Over all making the game gave a lot to my experience including my art skills, that is like me gaining a new level in flash game development both in code and art.

The results can be found at FGL’s MeezInside forum (you can still view the meezinside forum even if your not logged into FGL).

Anyway the game is about to be published and will be released hopefully this week or the next, so watch out for it. Play and make waste of your time in this simple and quick yet very fun tomato stomping game.

I have made a simple yet quite useful custom cursor class in this case is in AS2. All that is needed is a movieclip that will take use of it. This also doesn’t make the mouse flicker with constant Mouse.hide() calls, it stays hidden only when on focus with the swf. If you know how to extend a movieclip this would look very very simple and easy.

Sample SWF

The class extends the movieclip class therefore inherits all of a movieclip’s properties, methods and events. With a cursor all we would practically need is the onMouseMove event. See this custom cursor on the work from my game, Puttbase.

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class MCCursor extends MovieClip {
	static var cur:MCCursor;
 
	var frame:Object;
	var onMouseMove2:Function;
 
	function MCCursor(){
		Mouse.hide();
		gotoAndStop(1);
		if ( cur ) {
			cur.removeMovieClip();
		}
		// singleton class
		cur = this;
		// swap to a very high but still safe depth
		swapDepths( 1048031 );
	}
 
	function onMouseMove(){
		_x += _xmouse;
		_y += _ymouse;
		onMouseMove2();
	}
}

Basically this is all we would need. The class is singleton (restricted to only one instance) so the instanced movieclip is stored on the static variable cur. First create a movieclip, name it whatever you want, set a linkage identifier and [more...]

Just before the end of the meez contest, I managed to put up a couple of major changes or should I say upgrades to my game stomping tomatoes.

Basically the art from before was so simple: blue gradients background, a grey floor sidewalk and a couple of sign boards at the back. Just on the last day before deadline and after hours of continuous drawing and another for modifications on the game interface, I managed to make up a quite better background and menu interface. It was a real good experience to draw these since it is my first time to actually use this kind of style into game design. I don’t know what exactly it is call but it is drawn in vector with some good depth detailing and also looks like painting too. Anyway here are some screen shots.

Most of the things are still the same; only major graphical tweaks were made and the game is a lot better now I believe. And yay! my art skills are really improving. See this post for more info about this game.