Brooke Valentine’s Celebrity Girl Fight Game
If you made something that was used by over Ten Million people, would you/it be a success?
Over the last 10 years I have made countless Flash games for various agencies or independent artists. I do the job, get paid pittance and move on. Sometimes they barley rise to any notable or worthy existence and other’s get viral and do well for a while.
From time to time I perform various searches out of curiosity to see if anything still lives. Today I thought I would hunt down a game I made back in 2007 for Brooke Valentine called Celebrity Girlfight. It’s a boxing game where you battle against Paris Hilton, Jennifer Lopez, Lindsay Lohan, Lil Kim, Beyonce Knowles and Ciara. I was stunned to see “About 691,000 results” from Google. Clicking on the first result brings me to http://www.y8.com. It’s one of those Flash game sites that collects and offers them out for free but laden with advertisement. $$$
On this one site the game had been played 2,371,316 times with 110,043 positive votes (87.15%) vs. 16,224 negative. Over two million, wow!, I continue through one whole page of Google results, 10,000, 9,000, 20,000 plays, on and on and on. I bet if I was to go through more of the sites, the count would exceed ten million. “That’s awesome” I thought.
Now in most situations, the Flash programmer does not put his name on the game and remains anonymous, this is fine, I realize the selling point here is the artist, but I thought it would make an interesting blog post from the perspective of a developer. If I had 1¢ for every time it was played I could have made upwards of $100,000.
Food for thought.
Celebrity Girlfight
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iPhone Controlling Flash with TUIO and UDP help
I am in the middle of constructing a FTIR table, I am going with the laser approach after less than satisfactory results using Infra Red LED’s. It’s going well and I have had some success with Fiducial tracking using my infra red modded webcam cam, plexiglass and such. I had been building the apps in Quartz Composer but I am not too familiar with Quartz yet.
Until my lasers arrive I decided to try and get some output from my iPhone, after all it’s a great touch screen and switch to building apps in Flash, which I know better.
How do you get Camera or iPhone touch data out over the network to your MacBook and then have Flash read it??? Long story. If you are interested in going down this rabbit hole, check out these links.
http://reactivision.sourceforge.net/
http://www.tuio.org/?software
Georg Kaindl’s UDP Flash Bridge video
http://bubblebird.at/tuioflash/
http://pixelverse.org/iphone/oscemote/
And for lasers: http://aixiz.globat.com/
As I recently discovered, there are a few different methods of tracking and a bunch of lib’s on google code for such things.
After trying most of them and trying a couple of different table designs, I decided to go with http://gkaindl.com/software/udp-flashlc-bridge for UDP speed and http://bubblebird.at/tuioflash/tuio-as3-library/ for TUIO or Blob tracking in Flash and http://pixelverse.org/iphone/oscemote/ to track iPhone touches.
I find that sending the data over UDP using udp-flashlc-bridge is way faster and more efficient than XML- or TCP-based approaches. There is virtually no lag at all.
I modded my sea creature to work with a simple touch setup. Here is a crappy movie for now. I will do some nicer movies when I finish my table.
height="256" codebase='http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab'>
controller="true" loop="true" pluginspage='http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/'>The next thing was to get some multi touch functionality. This one took some head scratching and it still needs refinement. I started thinking about moving photos around, rotating, scaling and such. I realized I needed special movieClip class I had created for my last commercial Flash project. A movieClip class that can be assigned a dynamic registration point and it’s globalToLocal coords work no matter how deeply nested it lives. This allows for the first finger touch to be set as the registration point for the photo and the next touch to be used as the operator for scaling and rotating. Here is another crappy movie.
height="256" codebase='http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab'>
controller="true" loop="true" pluginspage='http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/'>Related Posts:
Audio Spectrum Analysis – Output to JSON File – Flash Tool
I have been unsuccessful so far in syncing animation drawn in Canvas using Processing js & audio played using the browser Audio tag with audio spectrum data I create from a ByteArray in Flash. It works in Flash due to the fact that the spectrum analysis and animation are executed together in an onEnterFrame event. The drawback to not having real time audio spectrum analysis from within the browser is the need to supply all the data to Processing js at initialization. It can be rather large and I have yet to perfect syncing the reading of the array with the current time of the audio. Some sort of progressive data stream and excellent timing system???
It may be I just have to wait until this feature is implemented into browsers. In the meantime, I thought I would post the source for the the Spectrum Analysis tool for greater minds than myself, wanting a quick way to get some data from their favorite tune and perhaps figure out a way to use it in a optimized fashion.
it’s very simple and outputs JSON with Left and Right channels to floating point numbers between 0 and 1. You can use it to make stuff move to the groove. It has a simple execution of this in the ui for you to see. Download the flash and php and throw it on your local server.
The process of accessing audio data from within the browser is quite beyond me, I really just want to see what I can create visually in Processing js and Canvas. Until it’s and easy to use API, I just have to keep looking for a way to get spectrum data quickly, hence this contraption. Have fun.
Download Source
This demo does not actually write the data for fear of abuse, but this is a sample of the output.
P.S. Carving Powder mp3 is one of my own creations. 
