News

I have been working on adding tricks to PoorBear over the last week. Trevor has sent us a ton of crazy animations for tricks (I will try and throw up a video preview of some of them soon) as a result, I was in desperate need of a way to generate collision verts in a manner other than plotting them by hand (yeah, I plotted and translated the verts for one animation by hand and it took about an hour). I will go over the method I used to solve this problem.

If you have ventured into our Media Framework documentation, you will notice that we have matching docs generated for ActionScript 2 and ActionScript 3. Thanks to Adobe, we have an official documentation tool (ASDoc included in the Flex SDK) for ActionScript 3 chunked full of features. For ActionScript 2 we had to rely on the community and ended up using the open source as2api project. Unfortunately as2api lacked some of the features we used from ASDoc, so we modified the source to enable it to do some of the things we wanted.

From our last post, you got a glimpse into Trevor's mind and where things were headed from a design standpoint. This update shows the concrete transition of those elements into the game. The title screen and elements have been incorporated, along with stunt recognition (flips, wheelies), item collection, and finer game controls.

Project Poor Bear is shaping up pretty nicely, with every day bringing in a little more "flair". Not to leave you in the dark we wanted to post some of the design progress and process. In addition, Trevor the man behind the "flair" kindly took a step back to share some insight into the origins of his ideas for the game and process. Below are images and direct excerpts from Trevor's mind, enjoy!

The iPhone bug bit and we have started working on a side project code named POOR BEAR. The project is a small iPhone game collaboration between the folks at Dreamsocket and Trevor Van Meter, who we consider friend of the family. For those who aren't familiar with Trevor, you may remember his game Fly Guy that garnered a lot of praise. Trev and I (Kenny) actually went to school together and were part of the same crew of friends, so we have roots. Personally, I look at him like a renaissance guy when it comes to illustration work. He literally does it all: cartoons, toys, comics, games, you name it. Needless to say, we are excited to be working together. Right Trev ;)

To begin with, we used Drupal to build Dreamsocket.com. We chose it for many reasons but perhaps the best thing about it is the community surrounding it. Drupal is open source and there are literally hundreds of open-source add-ons for it which are under active development. I would recommend anyone looking to build a website to put aside their preconceptions and check it out.

With this project, we set out to build a website that would establish a presence for Dreamsocket on the web, provide a place to sell our products, provide support for those products, and enable us to interact with our customers. I will cover a couple custom modules and techniques we used to reach these goals.