Phi Dinh is a developer; he is using Flare3D to develop “TinyKeep”. TinyKeep will be an Action RPG game with a dungeons and dragons style, originally inspired by classic roguelikes and RPGs such as Rogue, NetHack, Ultima IV, and boardgames like Hero Quest. At the moment, Phi Dinh has a cute prototype that gives an idea of how it will be. As usually, in every Indie project, the team involved in the project is looking for money to finish the game and make it a real thing.
TinyKeep was registered at kickstarter to raise the needed funds to accomplish it and this one is the last week to reach the goal.
Check out the campaign and discover a lot of cool features thought for the game. Of course, if you like the game you can donate and support it! 
Kickstarter campaign: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/phidinh/tinykeep
Kraken GameStudio presents ‘Escape Fast’, in this game you are a bankrobber that has been betrayed by your henchman. Your goals:
1 – Run away avoiding cops
2 – Recover the stolen money
3 – Get revenge to the bad guy
The game is simple, fun, addictive and has a beautiful 8 bits’s retro style. Drive across the levels and re-experiment the pleasure that you got playing those 80′s classic games.
It’s a real 3D game but the camera was placed to get an isometric view.
Victor Corvalan from Kraken Studio talked with us about ‘Escape fast’ and other things:
- ‘Escape Fast’ presents a lovely retro design, polished details and a very nice cartoon music style.
How many days did you spend working to get ready this beautiful game?
The development of this game took 40 days approx.… the graphics were ready in less than a week and the engine in 2.5 weeks… the tedious part of the development was the design of the levels. The 2 animations of the game only took one week to make. The rest of the time was for testing and for final adjustments.
-How many extra people were involved in this project (3D artists, musicians, etc..)?
There were 2 graphics designers, Jose Bordon and Julio Peralta; 1 3D modeler, Ariel Baez; the musicians Ronny Antares and Camilo Stager from PowerUpMusic and me (programming & levels).
- Why pixel art? Which were the inspirations for this game?
I personally love the mix of 3D and 8bits/retro look. I remember that years ago someone posted in a forum the work of Kenneth Fejer and since that I started to appreciate that style.
- ‘Escape Fast’ isn’t your first project using Flare3D. So, which were the reasons to choose Flare3D as your engine for these games?
When I was moving to 3D development I made a lot of research… I was looking for one easy tool with good performance to get married with
… when I finally found Flare3D and compare it with other engines I knew that I finally found the tool that I was looking for. Flare3D really reduces the developing time and let us focus on the development of the gameplay without get distracted in other things.
- There are a lot of people working in their first videogame, do you have some advice for them about things they should never to do when developing a video game?
If possible, start with smalls projects, you will gain experience with them and will keep you motivated. Don’t forget to develop the games that you will enjoy to play.
Play Escape Fast here !
In a HD world don’t miss this refreshing breeze!
Tip: Controlling the car could be difficult, using the virtual gamepad could be easier than using the keyboard.
About Kraken GameStudio
We are the first game development studio located in Asuncion, Paraguay.
We develop videogames out of reality with the objective to improve your entertainment. We think that games should be something out of reality!.
The members of the team are Victor Corvalan, Ariel Baez, Eladio Delgado, Jose Bordon, Julio Peralta and Raul Porro.
We work together with the PowerUpMusic team, our friends & partners from Chile and with “Creadores” whose owner is Paulino Rolon
About Victor Corvalan
I’m a developer from Paraguay and I am 26 years old. I develop videogames and also some boring stuff. Before starting with Kraken GameStudio, I made & developed interactive floors/walls’ installations, interactive bars, augmented reality, virtual presence, holomotion and other cool stuff… you can see my work in my blog (in spanish) http://pes-cado.blogspot.com
Flare3D Water Rendering tutorial with FLSL
by Jose Luis - Posted in Case Study, Events, FLSL, Stage3D, Tutorials
The last April 12, Sergey Gonchar from ‘Stage3D group‘ organized ‘Stage3D Workshop Meeting’. On which, Ariel Nehmad explained how to create a water effect using FLSL. The rendering includes reflection, refraction, dynamic waves , particles, etc..
Check out the following video to see how the pirates sail over a beautiful FLSL’s shader.
If you missed the event you can watch the recorded meeting here (you’ll find Flare3D talk at the end).
Ariel published source code and the live demo in his blog here.
Enjoy it
In the past few weeks, Jason has been working hard to create a real time light baking system, taking advantage of Stage3D and fully GPU processing.
This new feature will allows in few seconds add baked shadows and enhance the ambient illumination in your scene. This is great to get beautiful scenes without the cost to use dynamics lights and because a picture is worth a thousand words, please check the screenshots below..
On the left you can see a 3D Scene composed by cubes over a plane. This scene only contains the default directional light.
On the right, you have the same scene, but now with baked illumination with multiple lights(point, directional), diffuse baking, soft shadow baking and fixed UV edge feature. To make it, the scene’s illumination was pre-calculated with more than 100 lights and this took only some seconds!
The result? You can obtain a complex illumination without expensive resources.
The advantages of this feature In Jason’s words:
The point of doing this is because:
1) the name of baking dose not mean it is fully static, to bake it into texture in the real-time makes it has the possibility to change if needed, for example there is a scene with sun light at beginning, but may change to a night view later on.
2) the cost of baking is very cheap, may faster than uploading regular bitmap data in some cases,
Just assume we upload 101 light maps for this demo, that would be much slower,wouldn’t it?
3) precision of texture is no longer need as large as it could be, instead 128×128 is enough for a object, that is because we generate the texture by shader, instead of unpacking any bitmap format.
4) it is easier than having a external light maps, since for artist they just need to create an extra UV coordinates, all the rest of work just leave it to the program:)
5) the file size would be reduced a lot, as you can see the whole file is only 135kb, it is a pretty much a light map size, isn’t it?
The light baking feature is in Labs and will be available in a future release. Meanwhile, you can test this demo downloading it from our forum here.
Keep in touch for more news!
UPDATED: Zynga published FarmVille 2 Almanac with an infographic showing info about how FarmVille2 grew in the last months. With FarmVille 2, Flare3D becomes in the most used 3D Flash Engine around the world! Click the image below to see it.
Farmville, one of Facebook most played games ever, with more than 3MM daily users, and reaching a pike of 80MM monthly users, has launched its Sequel. Now in 3D!
What we denominated the Next-gen casual games some months ago, is now a reality. Using all the power of Flash 11, Flare3D and stage3D, amazing facebook games can be developed, and Farmville2 is a proof of this.
Zynga’s “FarmVille 2″ demonstrates how to make a high quality game using the amazing 3D capabilities included in Stage3D. This game will probably be of great inspiration for all those studios that are not sure how far they can go using 3D on Flash. Enjoyable characters, smooth animations and friendly gameplay are raising the social games to a new level.
From the beginning, Flare3D has been supporting FarmVille 2 development, and now, after playing the game in our computers, we are very glad with the great job made by Zynga’s dev team!
If you haven´t played FarmVille 2 yet, then, you can see the next video that shows FarmVille 2 making of and discover why Zynga chose real 3D to provide users a much richer experience.
Flare3D is waiting for you! Are you ready to use it in your next game?
FROYO TAXI – development explained at wandah.com
by Jose Luis - Posted in Case Study, General, Tutorials
We are very glad when an user shares his development experience with the community!!
At wandah.com you can find a couple of interesting posts explaining some techniques used in Froyo Taxi development. The First post is called “3D Modeling on Froyo Taxi” and explains the approach used by Wandaw to make the game’s 3D assets (cars, characters and buildings), This is a very important topic and rarely you’ll find information about it. Things like amount of polys for model and textures size are treated here.
The second post is called “Handling 3D movement on Froyo Taxi” is about ‘movement’ and explains how collisions, paths definition and some AI for cars and characters were implemented in the game. Wandah chose to use a custom implementation to solve it and explains how to get it using a simple approach.
Have you read the articles? Now click here to play FROYO TAXI!
A new exciting year is starting and Flare3D is evolving and growing every day to take advantage of new opportunities!.
So, yes!!, we’re talking about HTML5 and WebGL, and yes!!! We have decided to start a new journey into this new amazing world
As always, our mission is to provide Professional workflow to create next-gen 3D web and mobile based applications! – same tools, same workflow, same file format!
In this early Flare3D / HTML5 demo, you can see directly in your browser without any plugin, our lovely Yellow Planet model (zf3d) without any change at all!!!
But, enough talking, show time!!, check it out here.
We have more to show. Stay tuned, new things are coming to Flare3D!.
Flare3D’s Wiki is growing! and now, we will dedicate an exclusive FLSL section where you can find all kind of resources such as:
- Flare3D Shader Language Guide.
This document will help you with your first steps into FLSL’s world. Also, includes a FLSL’s API reference. - Code examples
A useful showcaso of FLSL´s examples. - Tutorials and 3° party examples
Contributions from Flare3D community
Check it now!
Enjoy it! 
Flare3D 2.5 beta preview includes a lot of improvements. The most relevant one is FLSL 2.0. The new version of our shader language is much more powerful and we wanted to know how far we can go.
Jason Huang is a young Chinese developer. He is an active member in Flare3D’s community and he agreed to make a demo using FLSL’s new capabilities. In the last months Jason worked very hard and the result was ‘Ancient China‘ an impressive demo that recreates a China’s scene 400 years ago.
These have been months of hard work, were we provided Jason support and he provided us feedback about issues and problems using Flare3D’s new features.
Technically, this demo includes advanced 3D graphics programming and modeling techniques, among them we can mention: God ray (the rays of light passing through objects), realistic water, cascade shadow mapping, vegetation animations, etc… (Ancient China puts AGAL capabilities at limit. So require proper hardware to run smoothly.)
Jason talked with us about the creation proccess.
‘Ancient China’ has a beautiful art design. Was inspired by a real place?
Not really, It was actually from our imaginations, which based on how we thought a place of my hometown was, 400 years ago. Its name is “Green Lake” of Kunming, China. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Lake_(Kunming).
How many people worked to build the demo?
There were only 3 of us worked in this demo. One graphics designer, One 3D modeler and me.
Which one were the challenges that made you go crazy? How did you solve them?
For the current version of Stage3D, it has so many limitations, such as 200 opcodes per program for AGAL, and few of temporal registers, etc. I solved them by reading a lot of public papers and doing testing over and over again…
sometimes, I have to compile the both art works and shader effects to get the best quality and performance ratio.
Please tell us what part of your demo makes you the most proud.
Everything, even with little tiny piece of grass that used vegetation animations which need to calculated precisely by vertex shader . I believe that if you are looking at every details that built in this demo, you would find something impressed you even more:)
What was your experience with the new version of FLSL?
In the very first beginning I was just trying to converting GLSL to FLSL. 3 months later, I started to optimize the codes by reducing the operations in AGAL. Gradually, I have been discovering new mathematical ways for shaders.
Currently, I have constructed my own FLSL shader library. that includes not only the basic techniques, but also some advanced techniques used in modern video games.
What would you recommend people about how to start playing with FLSL shaders?
Personally, the basic knowledge of 3D rendering is required. After that, trying to converting GLSL or HLSL shaders is much more practical other than just keep digging the theories
You have become a Flare3D expert lately! What do you think about Flare3D?
Flare3D did a revolutional contribution for Adobe Flash. Not only because of the C-like FLSL shader language that is easy for human to develop with, but also the remarkable 3D structures as well as extends 3D tools.
How many consecutive hours did you spend working in this demo without sleep?
About 2 months, most of the time, I spent on doing researching.In the past almost 7 months, every day I had over 15 hours on this. My life was like nothing but 3D. No joking, I fell in sleep with hugging my Ipad with some PDF papers , when I woke up 6 hours later, I used the theory displayed on the screen to test with FLSL. My leisure time is also doing this, since this is what I love.
What’s the next creation in Jason’s life?
If you guys needed, I will be working on extended tools for Flare3D using AIR, such as terrain editor, scene editor, motion editor, etc. I hope my little tiny contributions would help.
We presented Ancient China with the first announce of Flare3D 2.5 beta preview. We were astonished with Jason’s work and we hope to see more things soon ! 
If you enjoyed fight games like Mortal Kombat you shouldn’t miss this game made by “Ben Olding games” using Flare3D! Pay attention on each player’s movements and the detailed level design.
Choose a character, learn his movement, fight and become a legend!
Ben Olding answered some questions about the game and developing process
What do you think about the new Flash capabilities to present 3D contents in the traditional Flash Player?
I think it’s great, as a game developer used to using 2D it opens up loads of new exciting possibilities, while still having the advantages of flash, plus I’m comfortable using flash, so the learning curve wasn’t too steep for me.
Do you have some previous experience with 3D games? Was Flare3D your first choice?
My first time doing anything with 3D! I went with Flare3D because my artist, Marco, had recommended it and favored it because of the 3D studio max plugin. But after having looked with more interest at other stage3D solutions, and having gotten to grips with Flare3D (a bit at least) I have realized that Flare3D has many features over other systems that make development easier, its more than just a 3d engine, it’s a game development engine.
How would you evaluate 3D vs 2D workflow?
Being comfortable with 2D, I always found 3D to be a bit daunting, but having tried it, it actually makes many things easier e.g. in 2d if I wanted a level complete screen, I would have to get an artist to draw something nice, but with 3D you can zoom in, change the angle and you’ve got a nice menu background or whatever, also 3D seems to be well better for doing characters, with bones, skinning etc already built in. I’ve been wanting to make a new Dragon Fist game for years (this is the 4th one), and experimented with making 2d bone systems etc, but it was very difficult to not make something that would be too restrictive
Are you working in a new game? Can you give us some info about it?
I’ve pretty much finished a game called “Jake Renegade: Freedom Flight” which is a high speed, first person dodging game. I am pretty pleased with it and I hope to release it on Android and iOS as well as on the web. You can see a trailer for it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwFlL3rAErA
Finally. the characters have very particular kung fu movements, are there any martial artist in the team or you just watched too many Bruce Lee movies? 
A bit of both! I am a kung fu instructor, I teach the tiger style and the bird style seen in the game. Marco (who did the art) has done some ninjutsu. All of the moves in the game, except some of the special moves, I performed on camera and Marco did his best to copy the moves in 3d studio max
I am also a big fan of Chinese martial arts films. I tried to keep the game as authentic to the theme as possible, so no fireballs and all the characters are inspired by characters I’ve seen in films.
Find out more about Ben Olding Games here!
