One of the most interesting things that I saw today was the Independent Game Design Competition. Here were a few of my favorites from the competition finalists.

Flipside

In Flipside, you play an escaped mental patient with bipolar disorder. You start out a happy-go-lucky person in a brightly lit field
but at any time, you can let your dark side show and flip the screen into a nightmarish version of reality. You have different abilities depending on which world you’re in so you’ll need to go through both modes to beat each level. The amazing visuals for this featured a lot of DIY-looking textures such as cardboard and the character really looks like a paper doll.

Fez

At first glance, Fez is a classic 8-Bit, 2-D platformer with incredibly cute graphics. Then the camera flips around and you realize that your character is actually in a 3-D space. Well, mostly. Your character only interacts with the environment in a two dimensional way so using the depth-squashing adds a puzzle-like element to the gameplay.
Pay special attention to the faux-Engrish used in the dialog.

World of Goo

In world of Goo, you control a colony of crude oil-like creatures who are able to stretch themselves into complicated structures. The goal of the game is to engineer a structurally sound scaffolding to move your colony to a destination. The gameplay is quite a lot like Stick Remover but in reverse.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe is a very simple yet very expressive game. The goal is to move a ball to a target across the screen and all you have to work with is a crayon. All you do is draw something with your crayon and it becomes an object with physical properties. The genius thing is that there are as many ways to get the ball to the goal as you can think of.

One of the most important new features in Apollo is the ability to access the local file system directly. This provides developers with the ability to read and edit text or html files, save preferences locally, store application states as external files, serialize and de-serialize data and much more. This tutorial will cover the File API features in Apollo step-by-step and will serve as a supplement to the talk I recently gave at the New York Flex Users Group.

This tutorial will be presented in multiple sections. This first will cover the File and FileStream classes and the subsequent ones will cover the Flex components used for viewing and accessing the file system and serializing and de-serializing data.

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Hi. For you readers in NYC, I’ll be speaking at the next NY Flex Users Group on the Apollo Filesystem API. I hope you can make it! If not, watch this space for notes and code samples. Cheers!

NYFLEX.org

Hey New Yorkers, I’ll be presenting at the next New York Flash Platforms Group (formerly Adobe Users Group) hosted at Schematic on March 7th at 7:00. I’ll be discussing the ActionScript 3.0 Event framework from the ground up. We will cover the basics for people who aren’t familiar with events, but also talk about some of the more advanced features like creating custom Event classes and using the Event Flow. I hope to see you there!

Detail’s here.

Also, for those of you in the New York area, there will be a Flex Users Group meeting about the framework on February 15th.

Please click below to download the presentation notes and actionscript files.

• Basic Sate Pattern Demo (ZIP)
• Bi-polar Bear Demo (ZIP)
• Bi-polar Bear Demo (SWF)
• Basic State Pattern Diagram (PDF)
  
• Event Filter Diagram (PDF)
• Flex Store Demo
• View States in Flex
• My post on the DisplayList

See you next month!
The next Manhattan Adobe Users Group is coming up next Wednesday, 10/04. It’s going to be a design patterntastic time! Danny Patterson is a genius and fully dedicated Flash nerd who will most certainly be dropping mad design pattern knowledge on y’all. I’ll be covering the state pattern and some fun things you can do with it using Flash and Flex. Sign-up and see you there!

More info