I have developed a quiz game engine based on this original multi choice quiz by animike. The improvements I made to the original flash file are:

1. Removed the need for an external XML file, which makes it easier to distribute virally as a stand-alone file.
2. Added the ability to add infinite arrays of questions, so the quiz will have a different set of questions each time you play.
3. Added the potential to build arrays of questions based on statistical data, perfect for sports quizes.
4. Added the potential to plug the game into various scoreboard and in-game advertising APIs such as MochiAds.
5. Added brandable features such as a 'More Games' link and a preloader screen.

To test the quiz engine I released the first version of my football quiz, with 12 questions drawing from an array of 120 possible questions. It got mixed reviews on newgrounds.com, but seemed to do reasonably well on football / sports specific games sites thereafter. You can try out the first version of the quiz game here: Football Quiz

More recently I have released the first sponsored / branded version of the quiz called Premiership Football Quiz, which is sponsored by one of the UK's leading football websites - FootballFanCast.com. I have plans to work with the FootballFanCast team to develop other football quiz games, relating to specific teams, competitions, etc.

I am also hoping to branch out now into quizes relating to other sports, and to other subjects entirely, such as Pop Music, Movies, TV, Celebrities, Arcade games, World Geography, etc.

If you need a quiz game for your site, or wish to distribute a branded quiz game across a range of games sites please feel free to get in touch. I can quote on a per quiz basis, prices will depend on the level of branding, the number of questions, whether the questions are provided, whether you want me to distribute, etc. So there is no fixed price as such.

Turn your wordpress blog into a games arcade!

This beta version WordPress plugin, WP Games Embed, makes it easy to embed games into your WordPress blog by using shortcodes in your posts and pages. WP Games Embed is intended to be able to support content offered by the various free games sites out there using the codes or downloads they provide.

FEATURES

4 Different views:

1. Grid view - a grid of thumbnail images linking to each game (can be restricted to a single category or parent category)
2. Category view - this view includes a medium sized image and a written description of the game
3. Single page view - the page where you play the game itself
4. Featured Game view - this view is similar to category view, but allows you to pick the games yourself to create your own 'Featured Games' page.

Different embedding modes:

1. iFrame embedding - embed iFrame content using code provided by free games sites, or use this method to display games from your own server where an html file has been provided with the free game download.
2. Flash embedding - embed Flash content using embed codes provided by other sites, or embed flash games directly from your own site. You can even upload them easily using the wordpress 'Add Media' tool.

WORKING EXAMPLE

Visit Zap Gamez Arcade to see an example of the plugin in action.

INSTALLATION

1. Download the plugin from the link at the bottom of this page
2. Upload the wp-games-embed.php file to your wp-content/plugins folder.
3. Activate the plugin from the Plugins page in WordPress.

USAGE

Use shortcodes to embed games into your posts, or to create a grid of thumbnails on a page or your home page.

Embedding a game in a post:

Shortcode: [game /]

Additional attributes:

• width - the width of the game
• height - the height of the game
• src - the url of the game (html file for iframe embedding, swf file for flash embedding)
• flash - if set to true flash embedding will be used, if set to false iframe embedding will be used. (default=false)
• thumb - the url of the thumbnail image (70px x 60px)
• main - the url of the large image (appx 300px wide)
• title - the name of the game!
• description - your description including controls etc.
• featured - whether this should be formatted as a featured game. (default=false)
• game_url - only to be used in Featured mode (when featured is set to true). See  the shortcode examples below for more details.

Shortcode Example 1 (embedding game as iFrame):

[game width="640" height="480" src="http://www.example.com/games/pacman.html" thumb="http://www.mysite.com/images/pacman-small.jpg" main="http://www.mysite.com/images/pacman-medium.jpg" title="PacMan" description="This is a great game! Use the arrow keys to play." flash="false"/]

Shortcode Example 2 (embedding game as Flash):

[game width="640" height="480" src="http://www.mysite.com/games/pacman.swf" thumb="http://www.mysite.com/images/pacman-small.jpg" main="http://www.mysite.com/images/pacman-medium.jpg" title="PacMan" description="This is a great game! Use the arrow keys to play." flash="true"/]

Creating a grid of thumbnails on a page:

Shortcode: [get_latest_games /]

Additional attributes: list_category - the category id for the games you want to appear in the list.

The list_category attribute makes it possible to display the latest games under a certain category e.g. 'Arcade' or the latest games under all categories. Simply set up a main category called 'games' and then create all your games categories (action,adventure,sports, etc.)  as sub-categories.

Shortcode Example 3 (thumbnail grid):

[get_latest_games list_category="2" /]

Creating a Featured Games page:

Shortcode: [game /]
Additional atrtributes: (see above)

The important attributes for creating a features games list are 'featured' which should be set to true, and 'game_url' the url where the game can be played on your site.

Shortcode Example 4 (featured games):

[game  main="http://www.myblog.com/uploads/pacman-medium.jpg" title="PacMan" description="This is a great game! Use the arrow keys to play." featured="true" game_url= "http://www.myblog.com/games/pacman/" /]

[game  main="http://www.myblog.com/uploads/donkeykong-medium.jpg" title="Donkey Kong" description="This is a great game! Use the arrow keys to play." featured="true" game_url= "http://www.myblog.com/games/donkey-kong/" /]

DOWNLOAD THE PLUGIN

INSPIRATION

A long time ago I remember being inspired by the Dub Selector project at Infinite Wheel, a series of Flash movies that play heavy dub reggae loops, and incorporate various ways of triggering a selection of dub sound effects, drum rolls and keyboard notes. The project gave me the idea to create a more in-depth Flash music production tool, with many preset sounds and loops, and potentially audio sequencing tools too.

MY PREVIOUS EXPERIMENTS WITH FLASH AND SOUND

This was back in the days of Flash 5 and I was a novice with Flash, I had only a basic grasp of actionscript. My first experiment was called ATG Beatbox. Here it is in all it's lo-fi glory!

Pretty basic,  but quite fun to play with too! The main problem I had was getting the samples to loop properly, and to get 2 or more samples to play in sync with each other. These restrictions made the possibility of sequencing very limited, so I ended up creating it so that the user could trigger the samples manually and had to time it right to get the 2 beats in sync.

The only way I could get the samples to loop cleanly was by importing them into the fla and attaching them to keyframes in the timeline.

I later made a few other experiments, such as a piano arpeggiator which used actionscript to play different arpeggio patterns. The timing was always an issue, and I concluded that Flash makes a lousy metronome! Unfortunately I seem to have lost the source files for this project so I can't provide an example.

Other more recent Flash projects I have done which include an element of sound are the SoundFX Player and Artanoid Game for 76 Creative. Artanoid uses the as2 attachSound method to load the mp3 files dynamically from the server.

SOUND VISUALISATION

New to actionscript 3 is the SoundMixer.computeSpectrum method, which takes a snapshot of the current sound wave and places it into the specified ByteArray object. The values are formatted as normalized floating-point values, in the range -1.0 to 1.0. The ByteArray object passed to the outputArray parameter is overwritten with the new values. The size of the ByteArray object created is fixed to 512 floating-point values, where the first 256 values represent the left audio channel, and the second 256 values represent the right audio channel.

It is explained in more depth in the article Sound Visualization in Flash CS3 by Tom Green, which is where I found out about it in the first place.

This is something I'm still experimenting with, but here's a basic example of what it can do:

Notice that because the audio sample is being loaded from the server using the Sound.load() method, the looping of the sample is still not satisfactory. The only way to make a sample loop properly still seems to be to import it and attach it to a keyframe. Here's another more abstract example:

There are a lot more cool examples of this type of Sound Visualisation at the AS3 Sound Spectrum Contest Results Be sure to check out the winning entry, which really demonstrates the scope of what can be done using computeSpectrum.

NEW SOUND API FOR FLASH 10

I recently discovered the Hobnox AudioTool, which is exactly the type of Flash based audio tool I imagined. It's actually amazing! As it features effects, like distortion, delay & reverb, phaser, etc. I could tell that, although the interface was flash, something else was being used to process the audio. The other thing I noticed was that the timing of it's drum machines was perfect! Something I've never been able to achieve with Flash.

Further investigation of the new sound API led me to these three articles by Adobe Engineer Tinic Uro, which seem to be a direct response to the Adobe, Make Some Noise campaign:

• Adobe Is Making Some Noise Part 1
• Adobe Is Making Some Noise Part 2
• Adobe Is Making Some Noise Part 3

In Part 3 of the article he provides some code for a 'seamless loop' using the new extract() method with the samplesCallback event handler. I will put this code to the test as I am sure it will lead to new projects and experiments for me, the results of which will surely appear on my site in the near future!

Other Flash projects that utilise the new sound API are Tenoran, a sampling and basic sequencing instrument, and Noteflight, a a full-featured application that displays, edits, prints and plays back music notation.

This page contains examples of the different formatting styles that can be achieved with the WP Post Columns 2.0 Plugin for WordPress. The text is for demonstration purposes only and was generated by the Lorem Ipsum Generator.

This is a simple javascript for creating a mouseover effect on image links, also known as an image replacement script. It works in two stages. In this example "image 1" is the link image and "image 2" is the mouseover image.

Stage 1

Add this javascript to the head of your page:

function SwapImage1() {
document.image1.src="/images/image2.jpg"
}
 
function SwapImage1Back() {
document.image1.src="/img/image1.jpg"
}

Stage 2

Add the following onmouseover and onmouseout properties to your image:

<img src="/images/image1.jpg"
onmouseout="SwapImage1Back()" onmouseover="SwapImage1()" name="image1" />