Phil Hassey - game dev blog
Phil Hassey as Rambo
".. I've been there,
I know what it's like,
and I'll do it again if I have to."

Archive for the 'facebook' Category

I can has flash?!

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

So .. who thinks flash + Galcon = win?  I don’t know yet, but I’m giving it a try.  I’m not actually developing the flash version.  An awesome friend of mine has been doing the time on this one.  Though I’ll probably be doing the LAMP end of the deal.  At present the game is non-networked, but we’re been considering the possibilities.  A TCP/IP edition of the game could be made, but I wonder if that would end in tears.  TCP/IP isn’t ideal for gamedev IMO.  Flash doesn’t support UDP as-of-yet.

This isn’t the first time Galcon has reared it’s head from within the browser window.  (See my earlier blog posts …)

I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do with this once it’s completed.  Probably a few things.  Throwing it on facebook is an obvious one.  Throwing it on galcon.com is another one.  Maybe mixing it with something like The Maze of Madness is another one.  Or maybe something else!

One idea that I have that would be really cool would be if the tinypy vm were ported to ActionScript using Alchemy* .. and then somehow people would be able to script Galcon on the web and share it with their friends..

*I don’t know if you caught that .. but I think my weekend just got booked 🙂

Watermelons on facebook

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Watermelons was a pygame game made in about 8 hours one evening on the #ludumdare channel. Since then I’ve ported it to flash using haxe. This past weekend I integrated it into the facebook API. You can check the app out here. My server-side high score system was written with PHP.

The integration was somewhat challenging, since I was using a language not supported by facebook (haxe) and my integration involved using flash, which has some restrictions when used within FMBL. To work around these things, I had to embed my flash object within an iframe and then pass high scores back through my main web script in the browser window (instead of as a background request) in order to be able to use all the facebook notification features.

So far (after about 5 days) the app has about 160 users, which isn’t very many. But I suppose it’s not bad for my first shot at writing a facebook app.