Master of Alchemy: our first iPad game!

June 24, 2010February 21, 2013 Alessandro Crugnola iphone alchemy, chillingo, e3, game, ipad, iphone, moa, physic

We’re really proud to introduce our first iPad game: Master of Alchemy.

Master of Alchemy is an iPad game developed by DarkWave Games and published by Chillingo – Coming very soon on app store.

We are really proud of our game: it is being presented at E3 Expo 2010.

Master of Alchemy is an original and engaging puzzle game based on the manipulation of solid, liquid and gaseous elements.

Exploiting the features of a series of instruments (stills or alambics, button, hot air balloons, etc.), player can create new elements. To complete each level, he has to generate one or more required substances and bring them to some targets containers. facebook zoosk badoo

Substances’ streams are characterized by a realistic behavior, because of the implementation of a physics engine.

So, like an alchemist, player creates new substances, starting from basic elements characterized by different colors and by the three material states.

In detail, player has to manage a small alchemic laboratory that is equipped by an increasing number of instruments (alembics – like crucibles, pipes, coils, blenders, steam engines, condensers, etc.). Thanks to these tools, he can blend, fuse, sublimate, condense or break up elements, according to the targets and limits/obstacles of levels.

In background to the various levels, there is the history of Master of Alchemy: the war between the two factions of the setting (alchemists and mechanologists – the machine-oriented scientists).

At the beginning of MoA, player has to choose which alchemist to perform (among a group of six characters). During the game, his alchemist evolves.

Main Features:

realistic physics engine;
manipulation of colorful flows of gas, solids and liquids – transformation tools specifically designed to maximize the amazing capabilities of the iPad; an iPhone version will be coming soon
steampunk artwork style – Amazing Graphic Details
moving physics obstacles – buttons, hot air balloons, gates, big solid blocks, etc.
disappearing walls – to create gameplay variations: player will have to move tools inside the level more than once to solve it
secondary targets: purity, gems bonus, time bonus, to minimize particles loss/waste unique puzzle designs;
a fantastic storyline – a detailed background setting with a related comics;
presented at E3 Expo 2010.

Other Features:

60 levels – hours of fun!
Almost 20 tools (alambics)
Animated tools
More than 10 Interactive Obstacles (buttons, hot air balloons, disappearing walls, gates, big solid blocks, etc.)
Crystal Implementation
6 different characters to perform
In-game characters’ evolutions
Positional sound effects
An interactive and animated tutorial
More than a solution in most of the levels

Videos:

Watch Master of alchemy videos on YouTube

Continue reading →

Aviary new bird, Roc Music Creator!

June 11, 2010June 18, 2010 Alessandro Crugnola aviary aviary, instruments, music, roc

Yesterday Aviary announced the new bird: Music Creator ( codename Roc ).

Now anyone can create music and beats completely from scratch and right in their browser, by simulating almost 50 different instruments, ranging from common instruments like various drums, pianos and guitars to orchestral instruments like harps and flutes to more obscure (but fun!) instruments you may never have heard of like the balarimba and hammered dulcimer.

There are tons of different instruments to chose from.
Creation is really simple and every creation can be exported both as mp3 and to be used in the Aviary Audio Editor.

Let’s have fun with it!

Read pdf metadata with purePDF

May 28, 2010June 30, 2010 Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, purePDF ant, bytearray, metadata, pdf, purePDF, reader

In the recent purePDF update I’ve added the getInfo method to the PdfReader class, this allows to extract pdf informations once the document has been parsed.

Here’s an example:

var pdf: ByteArray = URLLoader( event.target ).data as ByteArray;
var reader: PdfReader = new PdfReader( pdf );
reader.addEventListener( Event.COMPLETE, onReadComplete );
reader.readPdf();

function onReadComplete(event:Event):void
{
	var map: HashMap = reader.getInfo();
	for( var iterator: Iterator = map.keySet().iterator(); iterator.hasNext(); )
	{
		var key: String = iterator.next();
		trace( key + ": " + map.getValue( key ) );
	}
}

In this way all the document’s metadata will be traced (Author, Creation Date, Title, Subject, etc..)

In order to extract the field directly simply use:

function onReadComplete(event:Event):void
{
	var map: HashMap = reader.getInfo();
	trace( "Author: " + map.getValue( "Author" ) );
	trace( "Creator: " + map.getValue( "Creator" ) );
	trace( "Title: " + map.getValue( "Title" ) );
}

Download the latest purePDF here.

Amethyst Actionscript editor

May 25, 2010June 2, 2010 Alessandro Crugnola general actionscript, adobe, eclipse, editor, flash, shell, visual studio

It’s since the first time I used Eclipse that I’m waiting for an actionscript editor non eclipse based!

I never like eclipse and hated all its problems.

Unfortunately Adobe decided to implement its editor over eclipse and also other nice editors, like fdt, used the eclipse framework to build their own editors.

I used Visual Studio for a while but that was enough to make me fall in love with it.

Visual Studio is indeed the best editor at all, without doubts!

Finally I discovered an interesting project for editing actionscript projects integrated into Visual Studio.

Amethyst is still in beta and probably too premature to be used in large production environment, but it’s a great news for me.

I hope they’ll continue in the development and create a serious competitor for Flash Builder.

For more info visit their product page: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Amethyst-Product-Page

Bicephalous Dance is on App Store

May 20, 2010June 10, 2010 Alessandro Crugnola iphone app store, apple, game, iphone

Try our first IPhone game for free! It’s a simple but addictive game which will stress your multi-task brain abilities!

GAME BENEFITS:

– Improve your multi-tasking abilities (it’s really important if you want be ready for the next iPhone release!)
– It’s perfect when you have nothing to do! (i.e. when you are on a train or your girlfriend/boyfriend is boring you, …)
– A lot of FUN!

GAME DEFECTS:
– brain’s short circuits possible!!
– creates addiction!!

DESCRIPTION:
Can you split your brain in half and play in two different way at once? Use accelerometers to move the grey ball while using your finger to hit the buttons!Improve your concentration and memory with these simple but addictive game. Share your score with your OpenFeint friends and find out if you are a real bicephalous!!!

GAME FEATURES:
– Tutorial
– OpenFeint support
– Built-in high score
– Endless fun with increasing difficulty

SCREENSHOTS:

DOWNLOAD:

Download it from the App Store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bicephalous-dance/id371977705?mt=8

WMF and BMP support in purePDF

May 7, 2010June 30, 2010 Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, purePDF bitmap, pdf, purePDF, wmf

Just a quick update on the project status. In the last 2 days I’ve added a couple of features to purePDF:

BMP support ( see BitmapImageSample )
WMF Windows metafile support ( see WMFImageSample )

Now almost all basic image formats are supported.

H.264 can’t kill flash

May 3, 2010July 28, 2010 Alessandro Crugnola actionscript, general flash, h264, html5

This is another interesting reading about the current discussion about HTML5, video and Flash: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_…-cant-kill-off-the-other.html.

Sincerely this last crusade against flash is just annoying me ( the same way the first svg crusade against flash ). In my humble opinion I think that next year HTML5 will be already an old technology and everyone will forget this war.

ZaaIL adds support for 40+ image format to Flash

April 21, 2010June 10, 2010 Alessandro Crugnola actionscript actionscript, adobe, alchemy, aviary, bitmap, devil, flash, opensource, porting, zaalabs

Zaalabs yesterday announced the release of an opensource ( under MIT license ) library, written using Alchemy, which will allow swf to load at runtime more than 40 different image formats ( you will have access to the bitmapdata of the loaded file ).

This is indeed a great news ( I’m thinking in particular to the benefits it can have for us at Aviary )!

This actionscript library is a porting of the DevIL library. And in fact reading at the features list of the DevIL library you can see that a lot of image formats are currently supported: