Earlier this week, Google announced a new IDE for Android development: Android Studio. They released an early build that developers can download and start using today. Based on IntelliJ, Android Studio aims to simplify the standard development process for Android which currently is rather convoluted and utilizes Eclipse. I've never been particularly fond of the Eclipse IDE, so this was definitely good news for me. I was excited to try out Android Studio, but found it was a bit frustrating to get up and running. I decided to collect all the issues I faced and the solutions and post them here in a mini-guide in hopes that it may save others a few headaches. (more...)

A couple weeks before the Flash Gaming Summit I found an interesting blog post from Colin Northway about managing texture memory in Starling applications. In this post he describes how he forces an error in ActionScript to receive an object's memory address which he then uses as a unique id. I thought this was a pretty cool trick and was discussing it with our engine developer at the office when we suddenly had a thought: if you can get the memory address of an object in ActionScript, what's to stop you from passing that address into native code and doing whatever you want with it? (more...)

I recently picked up a Nook HD+, primarily for app development. Typically, I use the excellent FlashDevelop for my projects, but after running through the set up on the Nook developer site, I was still unable to get the ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to recognize the device. As such, my Android project in FD wasn't able to deploy to the Nook. It's taken me several hours to figure this out so I thought I'd post some helpful links in case anyone else is having issues getting their Nook device recognized by ADB. I can't say that this will help in all situations, but this solved the issue for me with the Nook HD+ on Windows 8 (64 bit). (more...)

I've recently been toying around with the Axel Game Library (www.axgl.org). I'm really liking the library so far as it is based on Flixel, but also utilizes hardware rendering. This means you get better performance and is especially nice for mobile devices.
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A few friends and I have been working on a game together for the last few weeks. Everything was going well at first, but then we ran into a major snag: bullets were colliding with the ground when they clearly shouldn't have been. We are using Flixel and FlxWeapon from the Flixel Power Tools and we would see the issue pop up only on uneven terrain. If we changed our map to a basic, flat piece then everything worked as expected. However, introducing varying height platforms in the map would cause the issue. The image below demonstrates the problem.

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I've been talking recently about working a shorter, more efficient work week and wanted to share some of the things that I've learned over the years that help make it possible. Below are seven tips that will boost your productivity at work and help you avoid headaches at home. (more...)

This isn't a tutorial, but I figured it may still be of interest to some. Below is a sample image manipulation application I created a couple years ago while trying to get a handle on bitwise operators. The bitmap data is manipulated in various ways depending on which button you select. Here's a quick breakdown of what each button does: (more...)

In the last post, I wrote about what I think is a better structure for while loops. Today, it’s all about for loops and demonstrating how the little things can go a long way in improving loop performance in your applications. (more...)

The while loop is one of the basic looping structures in any programming language. It performs admirably, but how many times have you been bitten because you forgot to increment your counter? Chances are it's happened more than once; it's ok, it happens to all of us...but not anymore. (more...)

I'm surprised it took me this long to encounter this problem; but FlashDevelop doesn't seem to know the location of the fl class package by default. I found this out today while trying to use a Color (fl.motion.Color) object. To my surprise, FlashDevelop didn't seem to recognize the import. I tried to build and received an error message that the class couldn't be found. (more...)