Funtoxication and Monkey Madness

July 9th, 2009

Try Catch Games in partnership with North Loop Media, will be releasing Funtoxication and Monkey Madness for the iPhone and iTouch by the end of July for 99 cents each. Try Catch Games was brought on not only to concept but also to develop the application for iPhone and Flash. On top of this we developed two separate websites for both applications, which can be found at: www.funtoxication.com and www.monkeymadnessapp.com

We plan on releasing the Flash version to portals as a promotional tool, this is a proven technique to increase sales for iPhone apps. Check out the above links and let us know what you think!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Bumble Tales Demo Released

April 10th, 2009

We recently worked with Tandem Games and Perfect Dork Studios to produce a demo of their very colorful and addictive match three game Bumble Tales, due out later this month. You can check both the demo and full release of the game here.

Try Catch Games had a great time working with both game studios of which both put out fantastic games. Tandem Games is responsible for Domain of Heroes and Perfect Dork is currently developing a cool platformer-puzzler called Box Macabre. Check out their respective sites for details on these great titles.

–Nate

Posted in Kongregate | 1 Comment »

MN SWF Camp Presentation

April 7th, 2009

Yesterday was a lot of fun as I got to present to the local MN.SWF group at their annual code camp they hold.

I presented a simple game of Simon off of my good friend Brad Bollinger.  Both presentations went great and complimented each other well.  If you attended talk or if you are curious about the presentation and files, you can download the code and presentation.  
Download the code here
Download the power point slides

Posted in AS3, Flash Game Programming | 1 Comment »

Don’t get ahead of yourself

April 6th, 2009

Making games is hard work.  It takes planning, creativity, code, sound and lots of ambition but most of all it takes money.  Unless you have rich relatives that give you a big chunk of money because they believe in your game as much as you do, you have to find work on top of your passion game.

All of us at TCG are experienced in taking on freelance work.  However, we want to do games under the TCG banner.  By working with other indie/casual game shops we have been doing just that.  Along with all this client work we are developing Moonlight Lament and we are going to take our time with it.  With no real set deadline, it will get done when its ready.  With that said, we won’t be lazy with it.  We just realize the beast we are creating.

Even though this will be a Flash game first we will release this for XNA as well.  With the Flash version we are still figuring out how we will make money with it.  I will tell you this, we won’t be using much, if any, advertising.  Its absolute crap for making money right now.

Tags:
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

GDC

March 27th, 2009

Three of us Try Catchers are currently awaiting our red eye flight a few hours from now but I wanted to post some GDC thoughts.  Even though I don’t know the ultimate outcome of our work at the GDC, I am very encouraged by it.  We have met up with lots of passionate game industry professionals and aligned ourselves with them in an effort to work with them in the near future.  I wasn’t quite sure about trekking out here to San Fran, but now I am very happy that we did.

Also, there will be Casual Connect happening in July I do believe in Seattle.  Matt and I are already planning on attending that as lots of casual game developers loved what we had to say about using Flash to demo their games on portals.

We have loads of exciting things coming up.  We will be sure to log them all here so check back often!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

4k Flash Game Competition

February 26th, 2009

Its ON! The 4k competition put by Urban Squall and Gaming Your Way, has been getting a lot of positive press around the net and a rousing response from the Flash game development community. Personally, I have completed my entry and plan on turning it in around the deadline time of March 9th. It was a lot of fun to make and only took me a few hours to complete, but then, of course, I had to tweak it with graphics, extras and optimization.

It’s good to keep your skills sharp with these types of contests and to have a face in the Flash game development community. Lots of my personal close friends (in real life) are doing the competition as well. Minnesota represent! If you would like to learn more about the contest check it out here.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Ginger: Using it for uniform sprite sheet rendering

February 21st, 2009

Panayoti over at Urban Squall runs a fantastic blog called Game Poetry, there he posts great advice on all things for Flash gaming.  One of his posts found here is about improving performance with animated bitmaps.  In a nutshell it describes a code project that he has started up to create and manage bitmap animations from a sprite sheet.  At the end of the post he sent out a call to developers to help him out with specification for external data for creating animations.  I helped out and came up with my own, however it is now dated.  ;-)

Despite that I am encouraging you to check out the blog post and the project to whom ever wants a simple and clean implementation of managing animated bitmaps in your games or apps.  You can check out my implementation here.

Basically all that is happening in this example project is under the trycatchgames folder is my implementation of Urban Squall’s bitmap animation framework, which has since been updated.  In the Main class you can see how I am using XML to define an animation, create it using the animation builder, add it to the controller and play it.  By using the unified animation controller we are able to add one to many bitmap animations and retrieve them when needed.  It should also be noted that even if you don’t have rotation in your sprite sheet that you are able to add rotation if you so desire.  On bitmap animation creation you are able to specify the number of degrees in your rotation.

Check out the example project and the newest one in the Urban Squall code repo found here.

Posted in AS3, Flash Game Programming | No Comments »

Analyzing Sound in AS3

January 6th, 2009

I have been wanting to build a game that builds worlds/enemies/properties off a given music file for some time.  There are some decent games out there that are making such strides, one of which is Tube Rockers.  I like that game because it involves people making custom tracks to music videos found on You Tube.  Pretty cool.

However, with Flash 10 we have the ability, with the users permission, to read and write to their hard drive.  Finally.  I know I can say this for every Flash/Flex developer out there that we have been waiting for this since… well… Flash was created really.  And now without round tripping to the server!  Yay!

Analyzing sound in Flash has been around since SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() was introduced in Flash 8.  Using this, along with the read capabilities of Flash 10 we can bring in any mp3 a user would like to play in a game.  This is where the idea stems from.  Try Catch Games (www.trycatchgames.com) my casual game company is currently concepting such a music game, more on that to come.

Now to talk about sound.  Here are some stats:

Human Hearing: 20 to 20,000 Hz

Bass: 20 Hz - 250 Hz Mids: 250 Hz - 6 kHz Highs: 5 kHz - 20 kHz

Bass Drum: 50 Hz - 5.5 kHz Thump: 50 Hz - 100 Hz Punch/Slap: 2.5 kHz - 5 kHz

Cymbals: 300 Hz - 17 kHz Presence: 10 kHz - 14 kHz

Snare: 100 Hz - 12 kHz Center: 1 kHz Tight: 5 kHz - 6 kHz Crack: 8 kHz - 10 kHz

Toms: 4 kHz - 5.5 kHz and 9 kHz - 10 kHz

***

I am going to assume that readers of this blog know a thing or two about sound.  If not, check out a wiki and come back.

A lot of you are probably asking “What does this guy know about Flash that I don’t to analyze sound?”.  Really the answer is, nothing.  I just want to give out some information that I have found out to further your journey into building better Flash games or apps.  Let’s jump in.

Checking out the computeSpectrum method in the SoundMixer object you will find a few params:
computeSpectrum(outputArray:ByteArray, FFTMode:Boolean = false, stretchFactor:int = 0)

The params I am going to focus on are the last two and what to do with that data.  First, for the data that I want I set FFTMode to true because I am interested in the frequency spectrum instead of the raw sound wave.  With this frequency data I want to filter out (as best as possible) values that tell me when something is happening.  This “something” would be a beat, vocals or guitar.  Now I have to say from the onset that my filtering isn’t really that great…yet.  But I believe with the capabilities of extracting raw sound data from an MP3 and computeSpectrum (or one or the other) will help me accomplish my goal more accurately.  For now, I am analyzing on-the-fly and averaging values based on what I think a beat is.

The next param is the stretchFactor.  I believe this to be important to be tweaked as we can drill down to the frequencies that are interesting to us.  In my experiment I am using the values of 3 and 5, which give us a stretch to the frequencies of 5512 and 1378 respectively.  Now I obviously use the 1378 frequency stretch for testing for sound data in the lower spectrum (which covers a lot of sound actually) which is mostly beats, bass guitar and some voice depending on the music.  The higher one, 5512, would be used for higher frequencies like violin and female voice.

For some simple formulas in finding these frequency ranges I have hard coded x and y point values.  This can be found by the frequency max limit, which for the lower one would be 1378, then divide that by 512, as this is the number of channels.  You will find that each “slice” will be about 2.69.  This means that within each of these slices it will cover a particular frequency range.  In the case of covering 0Hz - 100Hz you would divide 100 by 2.69 to find how many slices it occupies.  In my experiment I would sometimes give or take a few slices in some cases.

I know none of this is ground breaking, but I did my fair share of searching and no one has talked about it.  My experiment that I did off of this research is a simple on-the-fly averaging music program that does a little filtering and displays a square when the grouped slices go over the average.  Currently, I am not going to share the source code as its a work in progress but if you would like to check it out contact me directly: nate |at| trycatchgames |dot| com

<a href=”http://trycatchgames.com/SoundAnalyze/bin/SoundAnalyze.swf”>If you would like to check out my experiment do so here.</a>

Tags: , , ,
Posted in AS3, Sound | No Comments »

Implementing the Kongregate High Score API

December 15th, 2008

I consider myself an “alright” programmer. So when something that is supposed to be simple in programming frustrates me, I feel like a complete moron. Enter the Kongregate API, chances are if you are reading this post you have dealt with it in some fashion. Now if the documentation was all over the place and split up (and done in an actual OOP example) it might actually make some since. Hence the reason for this post. I hope to clear things up a bit.

First, to check out the documentation here. Nice huh? Well hopefully I don’t screw it up more. You will notice that there are few options to which you can implement said API. I recommend the SWC since you can have code hinting and its right there at your disposal. Or you can go with downloading it remotely (this post does not deal with the component). If you decide to download it at runtime check out this guys post. If you do go with that dude’s way make sure you listen to the KongregateEvent.COMPLETE event. (this is what threw me off completely)

Ok, so this is going to be short and sweet. When you use the SWC way I recommend having a reference to it that you can access from anywhere. Let’s not argue about OOP practices and evil singletons, just roll with it. I like to throw a reference to it in my “Model” which I have access to anywhere, this could be said about any class that you are storing persistent data through out your game. Then in your “Main” or Document class make a new KongregateAPI (NOT getInstance() like the docs say and then listen for the KongregateEvent.COMPLETE event. Those two things completely threw me off because I heard different stories from different sources… as dumb as that makes me look. Then finally where you want submit a score do so in your “Results” class. (Imports NOT included in code, I assume you are just putting those in)

In your “Model”:
public var kongregate:KongregateAPI;

In your “Main” or Document Class:
Security.allowDomain('http://www.kongregate.com');
_model = Model.getInstance();
_model.kongregate = new KongregateAPI();
_model.kongregate.addEventListener(KongregateEvent.COMPLETE, kongInit);
stage.addChild(_model.kongregate);

private function kongInit(event:Event):void {
_model.kongregate.services.connect();
}

In your “Results” Class:
_model = Model.getInstance();
_model.kongregate.scores.submit(_score);

Posted in AS3, Kongregate | No Comments »

Hey Hey Shooter: Classic Released

December 8th, 2008

It’s been a long time coming but Hey Hey Shooter: Classic has been released on the public!  We have a lot more games in the works over the next few months so check back often!  It is posted on our company site but you can check it out at places like Kongregate as well.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/TryCatchGames/hey-hey-shooter-classic

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Releases | No Comments »

« Older Entries