Kornesh Kanan: January 2010

23 January 2010

1 week in the wild - Exoot MapleCity Lite

More than one hundred thousand game plays in just one week! OMG, thats awesome! And I think this is my most successful game I have ever created before. However the revenue this game generated is less than $3 USD. Due to low eCPM my revenue is badly affected and I wonder why this game getting hell of alot traffic from China and Taiwan instead of America (according to MochiMedia)

Recently, Im getting lots of feed back from users, especially those from Kongregate. Most of them were not really satisfied with the game play and their appetite for flash game has grown so much...They expect more form the game like more maps, more monsters, more and more!!

A picture is worth a thousand words. Here's an image from MochiBot.com showing MapleCity Lite's current statistics.

ExootLabs.com
Oh ya we have moved to a new domain and server. Visit us at http://www.exootlabs.com/ and lots of features under the hood..so stay tuned!

17 January 2010

getURL in ActionScript 3 (navigateToURL)

One of the things that has become something of a pain in AS3 is getURL. If you’ve used ActionScript 2 before, you know how simple it is to open a URL in a web browser.

getURL("http://www.google.com");

In AS3, however, it gets a bit more complicated.
You have to declare your URLRequest. This is pretty much a fancy way of holding the URL. You may wonder, why you need a URLRequest to hold the URL when you could just use the string itself? Well the answer is because you can use the same URLRequest with many different functions. And there are special properties to a URLRequest.
This is how you declare a URLRequest:

var url:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://kornesh92.blogspot.com");

The URLRequest by itself is useless, but coupled with navigateToURL, it’ll act like getURL.

This is the full code:

var url:URLRequest = new URLRequest("http://kornesh92.blogspot.com");
navigateToURL(url);

Put that in the first frame of your movie and when you compile it, this blog should open up in your browser.

16 January 2010

AS3 FPS Display Class

You can display your current FPS(Frame Per Second) during games.
Save as FPSTimer.as.


package{
import flash.events.Event
import flash.events.TimerEvent
import flash.text.TextField
import flash.utils.Timer

public class FPSTimer extends TextField{
private var fps:int = new int();
private var t:Timer = new Timer(1000);

public function FPSTimer():void{
t.start();
addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, onEnter);
t.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, onTimer);
}
private function onEnter(e:Event):void{
fps++;
}
private function onTimer(e:TimerEvent):void{
text = String(fps);
fps = 0;
}
}
}

Using the FPSTimer.as is easy. Just add it to your Sprite,MovieClip or stage like this:


addChild(new FPSTimer())

and it’ll display the FPS. Simple as that.

How to Monetizing a Flash Game

1) Sign up to MochiAds. This company allows you to ake money from every game play and offers some more interesting services such as leaderboards, link tracking, and so on..

2) Sign up to MochiBot, a free service to determine Flash games popularity

3) Sign up to FlashGameLicense, the place to buy and sell Flash games. Read a review about this service here
4) Think about a game design idea. The more original, the better. If you have no ideas, copy successful games.
5) Make your game…The most part of the whole process
6) Once you think it’s finished encrypt it. You can use the MochiAds free encrypter.
7) Add MochiAds ads and MochiBot stats
8) Submit your game to a developers forum or take a look at First Impression service by FlashGameLicense, to get some qualified reviews about your game. Remember to sitelock your game to prevent it to spread without your control. If you don’t know how to sitelock a game, read how to sitelock a flash movie
9) Now that your game should be really finished, submit it to FlashGameLicense
10) Wait at least two weeks
11) At this time if you found a sponsor, distribute the game according to the partnership you signed. If you did not find any sponsor, return to step 10 or proceed to 12
12) Sumit your game to as much portals as you can. For a faster distribution, try FlashGameDistribution. Read a review about this service here
13) Improve and fix game bugs, interface, etc...

05 January 2010

Sitelocking an Actionscript 3 Flash Movie (SWF)

Sometimes you need to make your Flash movie (or game) to work only on selected domains. Sometimes you may want to blacklist some domains so they can’t display your Flash content.
This is called sitelocking, and means you lock a movie to a specific site.

Site locking is important if you want to keep your game locked to your site, or you’re posting it on a site but don’t want it stolen from that site. Remember to remove the site locking code when you feel like distributing the game around.

It’s also best to encrypt your swf, since if people can decompile it, using any number of swf decompilers around, then they can easily remove your site locking.

Let’s see how can you sitelock a Flash file.

 
var lockURL:String = "kornesh92.blogspot.com";
var lock:Boolean = true;

var urlString:String = stage.loaderInfo.url;
var urlParts:Array = urlString.split("://");
var domain:Array = urlParts[1].split("/");

if(lockURL!= domain[0]){
 trace("Access Denied. You dont have permission to host this swf on your site.");
}

site lock to a set of possible urls instead of only one? Well, you’d create an array of url strings and then check against that. Like this:

 
var lockURL:Array=["localhost","www.site2.com","www.site3.com"];
var lock:Boolean=true;
var urlString:String=stage.loaderInfo.url;
var urlParts:Array=urlString.split("://");
var domain:Array=urlParts[1].split("/");

for (var i:uint = 0; i < lockURL.length; i++) {
 if (lockURL[i]==domain[0]) {
  lock=false;
 }
}
if (lock) {
 trace("Access Denied. You dont have permission to host this swf on your site.");
}

addEventListener looping methods in AS3

Instead of using


btn0.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn1.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn2.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn3.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn4.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn5.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn6.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn7.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn8.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
btn9.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);

function doSomething(e:MouseEvent):void {
  txt.text = e.target.name;
}

You could use this
Method 1


for (var i:uint = 0; i < 9; i++) {
this["btn"+i].addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
}

function doSomething(e:MouseEvent):void {
txt.text = e.target.name;
}

Download source code:

Method 2


for (var i:uint = 0; i < 10; i++) {
 this["btn"+i].addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, doSomething);
}

function doSomething(event : MouseEvent):void {
 switch ( event.target) {
  case btn1 :
   // dosomething
   txt.text="Button 1";
   break;
  case btn3 :
   // dosomethingelse
   txt.text="Button 3";
   break;
  case btn6 :
   // dosomethingelse
   txt.text="Button 6";
   break;
  case btn8 :
   // doSomethingDifferent
   txt.text="Button 8";
   break;
  default :
   // do nothing or something else
   txt.text="Other buttons";
   break;
 }
}