Master of Alchemy: our first iPad game!

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

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ZaaIL adds support for 40+ image format to Flash

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:
  • Windows Bitmap – .bmp
  • Dr. Halo – .cut
  • Multi-PCX – .dcx
  • Dicom – .dicom, .dcm
  • DirectDraw Surface – .dds
  • OpenEXR – .exr
  • Flexible Image Transport System – .fits, .fit
  • Heavy Metal: FAKK 2 – .ftx
  • Radiance High Dynamic – .hdr
  • Macintosh icon – .icns
  • Windows icon/cursor – .ico, .cur
  • Interchange File Format – .iff
  • Infinity Ward Image – .iwi
  • Graphics Interchange Format – .gif
  • Jpeg – .jpg, .jpe, .jpeg
  • Jpeg 2000 – .jp2
  • Interlaced Bitmap – .lbm
  • Homeworld texture – .lif
  • Half-Life Model – .mdl
  • MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 – .mp3
  • Palette – .pal
  • Kodak PhotoCD – .pcd
  • ZSoft PCX – .pcx
  • Softimage PIC – .pic
  • Portable Network Graphics – .png
  • Portable Anymap – .pbm, .pgm, .pnm, .pnm
  • Alias | Wavefront – .pix
  • Adobe PhotoShop – .psd
  • PaintShop Pro – .psp
  • Pixar – .pxr
  • Raw data – .raw
  • Homeworld 2 Texture – .rot
  • Silicon Graphics – .sgi, .bw, .rgb, .rgba
  • Creative Assembly Texture – .texture
  • Truevision Targa – .tga
  • Tagged Image File Format – .tif
  • Gamecube Texture – .tpl
  • Unreal Texture – .utx
  • Quake 2 Texture – .wal
  • Valve Texture Format – .vtf
  • HD Photo – .wdp, .hdp
  • X Pixel Map – .xpm
  • Doom graphics

purePDF, a complete actionscript PDF library

PurePDF is a complete library for creating PDF documents using actionscript 3 ( targeted for flash player 10 ).
The project is actually hosted on google code.

This is is a porting I’ve made of the famous java iText library ( version 4.2 ) by Bruno Lowagie into pure actionscript 3.0 (with some little modifications).
iText ( and purePDF ) has tons of features for create and manipulate pdf documents. A quick list of the features actually implemented into purepdf:

  • pdf viewers display options
  • alpha transparency, blend modes
  • layers
  • arabic RTL writing
  • support for pdf text rendering ( example )
  • tables ( nested tables, page split tables, table with images, etc…)
  • slide show ( page transitions )
  • annotations, comments, file annotations
  • patterns, shadings patterns (linear and gradient), spot colors, rgb color and cmyk color
  • linear and radial gradients with alpha ( example or example 2 )
  • forms (user input forms, textfields, combo box, list, checkbox)
  • paragraphs, phrases, chunks for text manipulation, chapters, lists…
  • images (jpeg, png, animated gif, tif, bitmapdata ) and image patterns
  • basic and advanced paths
  • afm, otf, pfm, ttc and ttf fonts (embedded and not embedded)
  • metadata, page header and footers
  • external, internal links
  • barcodes creation ( ean-ucc 13, ucc-12, ean-ucc-8, upc-e, pdf 417, ean supplements) ( example )
  • unicode, cjk fonts and text
  • file attachments
  • javascript ( example )
  • multi column text
  • Embedded movies ( example )
  • Vertical text ( see this example )
  • and many other features…

You can take a look at this PDF document (self generated using actionscript reflection) with the purePDF APIs.

Other actionscript libraries I’ve used for this project are: fzlib, as3corelib, ashashmap, alchemy, as3-commons.

You can both download the library from source code and compile it yourself ( see at the Installation guide ) or download the precompiled swc files from the project’s download section.

Moreover there are actually a lot of examples to explain all the library features and for a quick guide. You can find them listed and updated here. In General refers to the project wiki for all the updated examples/howtos and the project updates.

update: here you can find the updated online api documentation

Alchemy installation problems under OSX

I’m writing this little issue I discovered today in the alchemy installation under OSX, in case someone else is having the same problem…

In fact, today I decided to makes a little swc library for an actionscript project using alchemy ( because of the lacks of union in flash ), so I downloaded the alchemy toolkit for OSX.


I spent a couple of hours trying to make it working on my Snow Leopard and because I’m not a shell and perl expert I finally moved to the linux toolkit under ubuntu ( even if on linux the Flex builder is really far to be usable!)
Anyway, this evening I decided to spend some more time trying to understand why when I was trying to execute the alchemy “gcc” script ( the ones inside the achacks folder, which is a perl script) nothing happened.
After long time with old style “print” debugging strategy, at the end I discovered an error in the “config” script in the main alchemy installation folder.
At this line (line 33):
if echo $MACHTYPE | grep darwin &> /dev/null; then
I had to modify it into:
if echo $MACHTYPE | grep -i darwin &> /dev/null; then
because the command “echo $MACHTYPE” outputs “x86_64-Apple-Darwin“, with the uppercase “D”.
In fact, after that modification everything finally worked!