What Is Akamai NetSession Interface?

Friday, 11 February 2011 | Jason Slater

A curious application which you might notice installed on your Windows based computer is the “Akamai NetSession Interface” – and you may be wondering what it is and where it came from.

Well, first off, the application describes itself … Read More

New Flash Development: Project Introduction

Tuesday, 16 February 2010 | Jason Slater

Things seem to have been pretty quiet on the Flash game development side here recently but there are a few projects coming to completion in the background, one is an arcade game set in space, the other is a puzzle game with cartoon like characters. These have unfortunately taken something of a backseat recently mostly down to a few new development projects I’ve taken up, as well as an increase in blog writing.

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Game Developer Spotlight: ClockworkMonster Games

Monday, 1 February 2010 | Jason Slater

We recently got the opportunity to talk to Javier Lazaro, from ClockworkMonster Games, about what it’s like being a casual games developer, and get an insight into some of the ClockworkMonster classics and a peek into the future … Read More

Lessons learned from the development of an online casual game

Wednesday, 18 November 2009 | Jason Slater

Whilst working on a social media project for work, and being a curious software developer, it seemed like a good idea to have a go at creating an online Flash based casual game to better understand the mechanics of the online casual game environment. During this exercise, and after having produced a few other titles, a number of lessons have been learned – a number of these are included in this article.

Create something new

When deciding upon a particular type of game a number of options were considered but the one finally selected, a memory matching card game, seemed like a reasonable place to start. From this development an important lesson emerged that special something or new which gives people a reason to play the game over other similar “me too” games needs to be factored in. The original Pairs game developed was played on various portals around 3,000 times in just under one month – it may sound a lot but other games were played 300,000 times or more in the same period of time. When producing Pairs II a number of new features including multi-levels were added and it had more plays in one day than the original had received up to that point.

The best thing of course is to create a game from an original idea.

Lessons learned from the development of an online casual game – from jasonslater.co.uk

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Book Review: Adobe Flash CS4 Professional How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques by Mark Schaeffer

Monday, 16 November 2009 | Jason Slater

I recently bought a new book to help with my Flash development project titled Adobe Flash CS4 Professional How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques, by Mark Schaeffer. With the nature and planned format of the book it’s not so much of a straight read but more of a dip in book for appropriate techniques. As such, especially as each technique is only a few pages it is a handy read to pick to fill a few minutes here and there- the main text is 270 pages.

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