Dovyski

After Happy Farm and FarmVille attracted millions of user there is a lot of talking about isometric games. I've played several games featuring an isometric view then I've spent some thoughts around the idea of creating my own isometric game (or one for my company, developed during my inexistent free time).

Looking for isometric game engines, I found three great projects: FFilmation, As3isolib and OpenSpace.

FFilmation (MIT License):

• Have a programming interface as small and easy as possible, no matter how complex the internal code is;
• Rendering performance is a major concern when designing all the algorythms;
• Graphic designers are able to work on the application’s ( game or not ) environments without any programming skills, visually, and with almost immediate previews of what they are doing.

As3isolib (MIT License):

• Simple scene creation;
• 3 primitive types;
• Base class for displaying user-created conten;
• Plenty of styling option on vector based primitive;
• Integrates well with a variety of tween engine;
• Improved 3D isometric positional sortin;
• Scene & view renderer classes geared towards performance optimizatio;
• Performance caching of static and animated sprite asset.

OpenSpace (commercial, part of the SmartFoxServer platform for multiplayer games):

• Engine and framework for rapid development of multi-user virtual worlds and MMO communities;
• Customizable tiles' aspect ratio;
• Tiles Elevation
• 2D objects in a 2.5D world
• Backgrounds and foregrounds
• Scrolling
• Advanced pathfinding
• Powerful avatar management
• Advanced map interaction system
• Exhaustive documentation
• Complete Map Editor

If you were planning to develop an isometric game, you just found your first step.

When I play a game, I like to see all those flying particles popping up on the screen. Casual games make heavy use of this resource, sometimes more than what is considered healthy.

A particle system adds dynamism to the game and makes it feel alive. Where is the fun of blowing up an enemy base and see just a few flames as a reward? Players want to see lots of things flying around and sparkles shinning towards the camera. Flash gamers are no exception. In order to add particles to your game, you can use two free particle systems (both use MIT license): Flint and Stardust.

Flint is an open-source project to create a versatile particle system in Actionscript 3. The aim is to create a system that handles the common functionality for all particle systems, has methods for common particle behaviour, and lets developers extend it easily with their own custom behaviours without needing to touch the core code.

Stardust was inspired by Flint, but it has its own set features:

The first time I saw a really convincing physics engine working on a PC game was during a Half Life 2 session. All that Havok physics created an unique game experience. Luckily the use of physics inside games has grown and now we have a wide range of tool to use, even in Flash games.

QuickBox2D is one of them. It is a mini-library created to work with Box2DFlashAS3, which is an AS3 port of the famous Box2D C++ physics engine. The main purpose of this library is to significantly simplify instantiation of rigid bodies and provide a simple way to bind them with custom graphics.

You can start with QuickBox2D by reading this great kick off tutorial. It explains the engine itself and demonstrate how to use some of it's features.

I see lots of open source projetcs using Worpress as a blog platform, phpBB as a forum solution and Mediawiki as a wiki. I like them all, but maintaining them separately with no integrations is a pain. It's great when you register to a website and you can use the same fresh new account to comment on the blog, reply to a forum thread and/or contribute to a wiki page.

Excluding the wiki part, there is a tool that makes it all possible. OnePress is an integrated website and forum solution. It is, simply, a WordPress theme to serve as the foundation and framework for your web site and online  community.

Some of it´s cool features:

• Seamless integration with phpBB, complete with unified login and widgets to display forum posts on site.
• Widgetized WordPress layout with drag and drop interface to quickly build site.
• Professional featured content widgets to display important posts with prominence.
• Easy to use backend enhancements for editing OnePress widget content.
• Highly optimized page rendering process for optimal performance.
• Built with WordPress 2.7 and child themes in mind.  Flexible hook system for full theme customization.