I’m very excited that our first big TreeFortress game, Bardbarian, has launched on the iOS App Store! Bardbarian offers a unique gameplay style (think tower defence merged with a top down shooter), and some really fantastic artwork.
Check out screenshots & gameplay videos on the Bardbarian game site, or check it out on the App Store.
Bardbarian has also been greenlit on Steam, and will be coming to PC, Android, and other platforms soon.
Welcome back to another edition of the Bardbarian Dev Blog. This time we look at some of the new mechanics we’re adding to the game, and talk a bit about the though process behind them.
Check out the full post over at TreeFortress.com:
http://treefortress.com/dev-blog-6-iterations/
The latest Dev Blog for Bardbarian has come out! We’ve added some new characters, UI screens and other cool stuff.
Here’s a quick pick at the new Level Select screen:
If you’re interested in more info, head on over to TreeFortress.com for the full post:
http://treefortress.com/dev-blog-5-beta-1-completed/
When you include javascript in a WordPress post, WP automatically applies formatting to the script tag’s contents, causing script errors. This has led to a large number of workarounds, including: plugins, using custom fields, including every script as a separate JS file, and stripping empty lines from the script (to prevent WP from injecting paragraph tags).
I wanted a solution that would let me quickly inject JS directly into my post content, and wouldn’t require any special prep or have dependencies on third party plugins. After unsuccessfully hunting the web for an answer, I came up with a simple approach that uses a pre tag to prevent WordPress from formatting my code:
<pre class="script"><script>
// code here.
</script></pre>
Then just add the following to your site styles to prevent the pre tag from displaying:
pre.script {
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}
It’s crazy simple and the script executes properly. I’m kind of shocked that I didn’t run into this approach at all in my search. It makes me worry a bit that there’s some glaring flaw with it, but so far it seems to be working great.
Hopefully this saves someone else some time and frustration.
Note: there’s a chance you may need to disable “Settings > Writing > WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” to prevent WP from encoding characters in your code. I have it disabled normally, but in limited testing I didn’t see any problems with it enabled.
Over at TreeFortress we’ve put together a massive dev update for our upcoming game Bardbarian. To read all about it, check out the TreeFortress blog!
If you’re not familiar, Bardbarian is an iOS/Android game, built with Adobe AIR and the Starling Framework, and is slated for a Spring/Summer release in 2013. TreeFortress is a seperate division of gskinner, focused solely on creating our own apps and games. Follow them directly if you’re interested!
We would like to let everyone know that Spelling Plus Library (aka SPL), our Flash/Flex spell-checking library has been released open source.
We first released SPL as a commercial component over 6 years ago, with a major overhaul to support the Text Layout Framework almost 4 years later. It was always our goal to provide a high quality, performant, and feature rich product, backed by great support. As the requirements of the industry have shifted, and the demand for Flash components has dropped, we felt it was a great time to release it to the community at large.
The entire SPL repository is now available under an MIT license, meaning it is free to use for everyone, including on commercial projects. This includes:
You can check out the GitHub repository to get everything. Feel free to submit pull requests. Please note that we are no longer supporting SPL, so any questions or issues reported may not get immediate responses.
Thanks to our supporters over the years, we are super proud of what SPL has accomplished, and hope that it will continue to see life moving forward.
Wow. What a difference of couple of years makes. Most of you have noticed a shift in the industry over the last two years towards HTML5 — instead of running away from this change, we’ve embraced it. Our response was CreateJS: a collection of Javascript libraries that allow us to create the same high quality experience and quick turnaround that we are known for.
Not only has the framework been a major part of our development, but some great tools have been created to improve user workflow, such as ToolKit for CreateJS and Zoë.
We are happy to announce new versions of the CreateJS Libraries, available now on the CreateJS CDN and GitHub.
This update includes a new common event model, vastly improved documentation, and a ton of new features and fixes for each library. For specific information on the changes, please review the VERSIONS.txt file in the relative GitHub repositories.
We have also introduced a minified CreateJS library to the CDN, containing all the latest libraries in one handy file.
With this release, we are happy to announce the launch of the CreateJS blog, which will provide a centralized location for announcements and articles about the libraries. Read more about the update to the CreateJS libraries here.
Thank you all for testing, feedback, contributions, and bug reports…keep them coming!
One of the toughest aspects of doing Game Development with GPU rendering, is managing the texture size of your various animations. Traditional SpriteSheets consume texture memory extremely quickly, and in the age of Retina Devices, they’re starting to prove inadequate.
To help work around this problem, our guys at TreeFortress have put together a library called SpriterAS. SpriterAS is a plugin which allows you to playback Spriter Animations (.SCML files) in AIR using Starling/Stage3D.
What is Spriter?
Spriter is a tool for creating so-called ‘modular’ animations which require a very small texture footprint. This enables long, complex animations running at a smooth 60fps.
For full details, examples and code snippets, check out the blog post over at treefortress.com!
Also, in case you’re wondering, we are planning on creating a Javascript version for use with EaselJS in the future 🙂
