Sound Effects and Music are two things that are easy to forget about when you’re marching like mad to complete a game on time. SFXR is an awesome little program you can play with to generate a lot of really great sounding sound effects, and its FREE. It won’t replace a good sound library, or a qualified sound contractor, but for a certain type of game, it could easily give you the majority of the sound effects you need to get started. Basically, by tweaking a bunch of sliders you can generate a wide variety of synthesized sounds. It is definitely worth spending some time with it to see if it can help you out in your development efforts. Visit the developer’s homepage to grab it.

It’s called the bleeding edge for a reason. In our hurry to target the latest and greatest features in the most up to date Flash Player version, we can find ourselves in a sticky situation where buggy, but “valid” Flash Players can create a less than enjoyable game playing experience. At best our games will not work, at worst, they will work only well enough to give someone an experience so craptistcally bad that they decide that not only does our game suck, but so does our development company, the website hosting our game, and anything ever that was related to Flash in any sort of way. Yikes. There are a few ways to make sure that the user is using a Flash Player version that jives with our game, and we’ll explore the most fool proof in today’s article.

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I am going to be heading out of town for the next week or so. Tomorrow’s post will go live as always, and if I find some time this afternoon I will put together something for next week. If not, I will take care of that and any comments as soon as I return. Have a great week!

For a few years I worked with a coder genius, a college mate named Tim, who has since gone off to bigger and better places (namely tech development and research in 3d graphics rendering at Nvidia, Sony and now at Intel). By far the most capable and efficient coder I’ve ever met, Tim was also a one man coding gestapo. He had a 0-tolerance policy against crappy code. At the time, I thought I was a pretty decent coder. I was not. I was approaching an engineering task like a caveman and I’m embarrassed to even think about the crap I was producing back then. Continue Reading »