Sam Burdge – Smarter Than The Average Blog

A simple 5 page site built for music composition, sound design and music searches company 'little bits of mischief'. The site is built in php / XHTML and features Flash audio and video players. It's always a pleasure for me to build simple, classic designed sites. I particularly like the red, white, blue colour scheme in this design.

Check it out: www.littlebitsofmischief.com

This week I have been working on improving the 'Moving Image' section of photoneil.com. When I first built the site (designed and built by 76 Creative) the Moving Image page featured Neil's video showreel, since then video has become a more prominent aspect of his work so I have created a video gallery page for the site, allowing him to showcase a range of his video work under different categories.

As this video gallery uses seperate pages for the video list and the player itself I programmed it in PHP using the Longtail / JW Player to play the flv videos. For more information about encoding video for Flash as flv see my article: Encoding FLV

The video gallery also offers the option to download higher quality Quicktime Movies of each video. I encoded the quicktimes using the mpeg-4 codec and reducing the frame size slightly to allow for higher picture and sound quality while keeping the filesizes reasonable for a download.

Check it out: www.photoneil.com/movingimage.php

I have been working on a couple of Flash games recently for my new arcade site zapgamez.com. The first of these games is Zombie Killer Gorefest 3, which is now previewing on Zap Gamez. You can play the game here:
http://www.zapgamez.com/games/action/zombie-killer-gorefest-3

The official release text for the game is as follows:

Currently exclusive to ZapGamez.com, Zombie Killer Gorefest 3 is a point and click shoot 'em up where you have to defeat the zombie hordes in 3 chilling action-packed levels. Inspired by 70's and 80's Horror and B-Movie genres, this game includes it's fair share of blood and gore, so is therefore not appropriate for younger players.

I created the game in actionscript 2, possibly one of my last as2 projects before I move over to as3 fully. The graphics and animation are a more prominent part of the game than the scripted aspects which are fairly basic hitTest functions.

The game will probably stay exclusive to Zap for the next couple of weeks before I release it through MochiAds distribution. If you are interested in getting the game for your site when it is released please subscribe to my RSS feed and I will announce the release here on my blog in the near future.

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

GETTING STARTED

1. Open a new flash document
2. Go to 'File ->Import -> Import to Stage...' (or CTRL+R) and import your logo image.
3. Move your logo to the top left corner of the stage (position 0,0)
4. Go to 'Modify -> Document' (CTRL+J) and set your document's height and width to the height and width of your logo image. Set the framerate to 12fps.

CREATING THE SHINE

1. Create a new layer above the logo layer for your shine
2. In your new layer draw a white rectangle with no outlines (about 25ph high and the width of your logo)
3. Select your rectangle and go to 'Modify -> Convert to Symbol' (F8) and choose 'Movie clip' as the symbol type, name it 'shine'.
4. Double click on your new movieclip to open it, select the rectangle again and repeat step 4, converting it into another new Movie clip, but this time name it 'rectangle'.