On my way toward new adventures

I have left my position as flash developer on Isotop, and starting February 1st I will instead be joining Quickspin as Game Client Developer.

I have been working on Isotop for over five years, and it has been a great time. During that time I have been working with several large companies and projects such as TV4 and DICE. I have learned so much during this time, and I have gotten lots of great friends. I wish them all the best in the future.

Ahead of me I have some new and very exciting times, developing online gambling games. I’m sure it will be a great time, and I’m looking forward of being a part of Quickspin from such an early stage.

But before I start at my new job I have two weeks of free time (starting today). And that means I’ll be able to focus full time on Ripple Dot Zero.
Exciting times ahead indeed.
/Tommy

Abandoned: My Ludum Dare #21 Entry

Splash screen for Abandoned

Play the game over at the ludum dare site.

Note: This game was created as an entry for the 21:st Ludum Dare competition, where a game has to be created from scratch within 48 hours. All graphics, sounds and code has to be created during this time, and every participant has to work alone (no teams). It is permitted to use existing frameworks and personal code libraries if these are declared and shared before the competition starts (I used a slightly modified version of the PushButton Engine). The theme for the competition was “Escape”. Continue reading

Silver medal at Android Hackathon

I participated in Android Hackathon this weekend, where the goal was to build a game for an Android phone in one day – and the theme was retro (8-16 bits).

My plan was to make a game similar to Metro Siberia since I think that it fits very well on a phone with only a touch screen. Limited time and limited experience with Android forced me to abandon my plan of using ‘real’ levels and instead use randomly generated ones.

Still it turned out to be pretty good, and was voted as the second best game in the competition! This was even more honorable since the other entries were very well made and the competition was really hard.
Thanks everyone who participated, and thanks to Bwin, Stockholm Google Technology User Group for arranging such a great compo!

My entry (filmed with a crappy camera). Music is made by Simon Stålenhag and taken (with his permission) from our common hobby project Ripple Dot Zero.

Embedded fonts disappear when updating to FlexSDK 4.1

I recently updated my flex SDK to 4.1, (from 3.x) just to find that all my embedded fonts were missing.

This was the scenario:

  • * Embedding fonts using the [Embed] meta tag
  • * Applying font using TextFormat (don’t know what happens if you use CSS, my guess is that it won’t work either)


Quick fix: note the “embedAsCFF”

[Embed(source="font.ttf", fontFamily="x", mimeType="application/x-font", embedAsCFF="false")]
public var FontClass:Class;



What is this?

I used the Font.enumerateFonts() to get an array of my embedded fonts (my font was there, but still not visible in my textfield).
Check the fontType-property. Here I found that it was “embeddedCFF” instead of “embedded”. What is the difference?

“embeddedCFF” is a bit more lightweight, but can only be used with the new text engine (flash.text.engine.*).
“embedded” is an embedded font, but can only be used with the older flash.text.TextField.

Since the SDK 4.1 it seems like fonts are embedded as CFF by default, which breaks all the fonts in TextFields if you have coded with an earlier SDK before.

Docs about this: Livedocs about FontType.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

When Dreams Come True

People who knows me know I’m a big fan of Sonic The Hedgehog. I still remember very clearly exactly how I felt the first time I saw Sonic the hedgehog on my friends tv screen. I was eleven years old and the graphics was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, it was crisp like a cartoon.

And now I’m excited again. I have just learned that some of the songs, especially “Star Light Zone” – one of my favorite Sonic level songs of all time – is actually based on a song by a Japanese pop group named “Dreams Come True”. This was totally new information for me, and hearing my old favorite tune with lyrics just gives me the biggest smile =D

So I just thought I should share my new joyous discovery! You can read more about the connection between Dreams Come True and Sonic in this article: http://info.sonicretro.org/DREAMS_COME_TRUE or watch the youtube clip right below! Enjoy!!
/Tommy