We are pleased to show the first public version of our latest project:

http://www.wsirc.com

wsIrc is a web IRC client (like mibbit), and is free to integrate within any website. You may use it as you want, and connect to any IRC server / network.

The main advantage of wsIrc over mibbit:
- You may fully customize the color scheme used by wsIrc (to reflect at best your own website)
- We offer a mobile interface to be able to chat from an IPhone or a windows smartphone for example (http://www.wsirc.mobi).
- We integrate all the channel operation needed for a channel operator, like ban, kick, channel settings, and much more.

Also, as we are developing this, we are also open to your wishes, bug reports, comments.

The Abyssal Engine is a powerful professional game creation tool kit and rendering system for creating quality 3D software. The technology is designed to reduce development time while empowering developers with a strong suite of tools needed to produce great visual effects and immersive online or offline worlds. 

The technology allows the developer to create everything from single player RPG titles, Real Time Strategy Games, to Multiplayer and Massively multiplayer products as well as simulation applications. 

The 30 day Tools Trial includes all of the tools that your art team can develop with excluding source code. It includes documentation, samples and information you’ll need to determine whether or not Abyssal is right for your projects


Unlock your development potential!

Reduce development time:
When getting your product out quickly matters, there’s no time to waste on developing engines, networking and tools. With Abyssal technology you have the technology already in place to start and finish development of complex software. 

Lessen Risk:
Develop with stable proven technology. The Abyssal technology has been developed by a team of industry professionals that have done contract work for some of the largest names in the business such as Boeing, Eidos, NCsoft and SAAB. 





Cost effective:
Spend less so that you can spend more in the area that truly matters ~ on development of your products! 

High compatibility:
The Abyssal Engine is capable of functioning properly on a wide range of hardware configurations; from the latest of systems to older 3D card technology ensuring that your software is usable by a broad range of consumers without compatibility issues getting in the way.

BuyNow: Get it now for $1500 $300
Download Trial: 30 day Tools Trial

SWF DecompilerPowerful Flash Decompiler Trillix with full Flash 10 and AS 3.0 support!

SWF Decompiler delivers the best functionality and user-friendly way for complete conversion of SWF file into FLA and Flex file back into its source format. Alternatively, you can extract SWF objects like texts, sounds, shapes, morphs and images, or use “Edit SWF” feature to change the SWF the way you want. 

With SWF Decompiler you can:

Decompile SWF and Convert it into FLA
From now on you can also decompile and convert Flex files. If you have ever lost the source code of your SWF file, you probably wished you had some decompiling software at hands. Thanks to Eltima Software, now you do have it. SWF Decompiler is a perfect tool to recover your source or FLA files so you can alter them in the native Flex or Flash environment.



Alter SWF files without decompilation
With SWF Decompiler you can edit sounds, images, colors, gradients, lines, dynamic texts and links even without converting SWF to FLA. Simply select the needed file and choose the objects you would like to replace. SWF Decompiler controls are handy and intuitive, so your work will be done within a couple of seconds!



Extract SWF elements
SWF Decompiler easily exports SWF elements to your hard drive: Flash Video to AVI, MPEG, FLV and FLA, save sounds as WAV or MP3, images – as PNG, JPEG and BMP, texts as RTF, TXT and HTML. Our Decompiler can convert the whole SWF file to FLA or Flex file into its source project, or export only certain Flash resources into FLA format. Flash Player EXE files are decoded the same easy way as common SWF files.



PLUS! Flash Decompiler Trillix lets you download and save Flash movies from the web thanks to 2 browser plug-ins for Internet Explorer and FireFox.

BuyNow: Get it now for only $79.95
Download Trial: Here
Product Website: www.decompiler-swf.com

Since a couple of days, we started to work on a new game engine, when I say we, I could say mainly I, but lucky me, some good people on the Make Web Games forums seems to jump on the train too.

This game engine will be GNU licensed, which means, it will be free to use and run. However some modules as well as the support may be offered for some fee later on.

What will do this engine? Well basically the engine already does or will do what you may expect from a text game:
- Allows to customize the look & feel, even players will be able to choose which look & feel they want to use if the game offers more than one.
- Allows changing language (and being able to edit the languages file via the web interface).
- Have background events like restoring health or energy, and this without the need of any crons.
- Easy to develop new “locations” or “tools” without the need of modifying each and every file for it.
- Comes with a premade generic game, to demonstrate how things work.
- Unlimited stats.
- Self installing engine (on the database and configuration side).
- Self installing modules (on the database side or any other needs the module may have).

But don’t just believe on my words, go to the website http://www.zapengine.com, and download it to see how it goes by yourself! Of course, currently it’s not a full game, and I cannot promise you will not need to change the database and/or lose data if you upgrades later on. Be prepared also to see code like you never saw while working with other game engines. All is cleanly separated in different directories; each with it’s on function. Modules are within their own directory and defined by a file called “part.def” which the core code will check and use as “hook” to use the module. The current status is more than promising, and I highly encourage everyone here to test it and comment it out.

What I can promise is, that as long as there is some interest in it, I will continue to contribute.

About the author:
Alain Bertrand is a game creator and owner/creator of “Nowhere Else and Beyond” (NEaB) since March 2005. From 2005 until 2009 more than 110,000 players registered, all of this was achieved using most of the strategies mentioned here. It proves that constant work pays off, even in the current hard times.

A Microsoft Research project, visual programming language for creating games. Targeted at kids this is a great visual tool for beginners to learn how to program games. There is no code to write, just pick and arrange actions. You may also want to read the kodu blog “I Didn’t Know You Could Do This in Kodu” which explains some interesting ways the language is being used.

Description: Kodu is a new visual programming language made specifically for creating games. It is designed to be accessible for children and enjoyable for anyone. The core of the Kodu project is the programming user interface. The language is simple and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions. Conditions are evaluated simultaneously.

The Kodu language is designed specifically for game development and provides specialized primitives derived from gaming scenarios. Programs are expressed in physical terms, using concepts like vision, hearing, and time to control character behavior. While not as general-purpose as classical programming languages, Kodu can express advanced game design concepts in a simple, direct, and intuitive manner.

Features:

Kodu provides an end-to-end creative environment for designing, building, and playing your own new games.
• High-level language incorporates real-world primitives: collision, color, vision
• Uses Xbox 360 Game Controller for input — no keyboard required
• Runs on XBox 360 and PC
• Interactive terrain editor
• Bridge and path builder
• Terrain editor – create worlds of arbitrary shape and size
• 20 different characters with different abilities

Links: Homepage - Kodu Blog

Google announced Chrome OS just couple days ago. It is time to try it out for yourself. By the looks, it is a linux kernel with a Chrome browser on top of it (I didn’t really read all that much about it). The idea behind the OS is that nothing gets stored on the computer locally but all the date goes on the web services. This is probably ideal for netbooks and people who do nothing more than browse the internet. There are loads of them! It would make a lightweight netbook with nothing more than motherboard, screen, keyboard and a touchpad. Chrome OS could even go on your touch screen kitchen computer. Now that YouTube supports 1080p videos it could even make some sort of DVR/streamer device. Google Docs catching up to Microsoft Office (as announced by Google) I can see how Google is bringing all their services together. In my opinion, there are quite a few uses for Chrome OS. Read more for screenshots, download links to VMware hard drive image and how to run it on your computer.

Description: Google Chrome OS is a project by Google Inc. to develop a lightweight computer operating system devoted to using the World Wide Web. Announced on July 7, 2009, it is set to have a publicly available stable release during the second half of 2010. The Linux-based operating system will sport a graphical user interface based on Google’s Chrome web browser and will run on systems with either x86 or ARM processors. Chrome OS is designed for netbooks and is thus separate from the Android operating system, which was designed primarily for use on smartphones, with support for conventional applications running on the device. The Chrome OS user interface will take a minimalist approach, much like the company’s Chrome web browser, and will rely solely on cloud computing, with all applications residing on remote servers, rather than on the device itself. Hence Chrome OS is aimed at users who spend most of their computer time on the Internet.

What is Chrome OS?

Best described by Youtube video

Instructions for running on VMware

1. Create a new Virtual Machine.
2. Select OS Linux/Ubuntu.
3. Create a blank hard drive (doesn’t matter what size since it is gonna be removed).
4. Extract the *.vmdk file to a folder.
5. Go to virtual machine properties and remove the hard drive created by the VMware wizard.
6. Add vmdk file as a new hard drive (in advanced options it should be IDE 0:0).
7. Boot

Download: GDGT
You can get Chrome OS version build by GDGT at the link above. You will need to create an account on their website in order to download VMware image. This build will require to login with your Google account credentials.

Links: Homepage, Chrome Blog, Google Blog, Wikipedia

123Ticket.com is an online alternative payment provider, headquartered out of Barcelona, Spain. The company provides a popular micropayment system that allows customers to make purchases online without a credit card. The billing solution is for merchants who wish to sell digital content (video, music, applications, etc…) through (short message service) and micropayment mobile billing. 123Ticket has the world’s largest telecom network with 26 web and telecom platforms across the world and over 6 million daily hits on their billing platform.

Instalation  is a piece of a cake, you are fully guided how to install it inside your game or website without much troubles.

Info:

BackLink Analysis Tools

Yahoo Site Explorer - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

Search Phrase Suggestion and Volume Research Tools

Free:

• Google Insights For Search - http://www.google.com/insights/search/
• Google Search-based Keyword Tool - http://www.google.com/sktool/
• The Free Keyword Tool – http://www.wordstream.com/keywords/

Paid:

• WordTracker - http://www.wordtracker.com
• Keyword Discovery - http://www.keyworddiscovery.com

Toolbars and Plugins

• SEO For FireFox
• FireBug
• YSlow for FireBug
• Privoxy + Tor – This will let you change your IP address for testing.
• HTTPFox
• LiveHTTPHeaders

Demographics and Analytics

• HitWise - http://www.hitwise.com
• Compete - http://www.compete.com
• Alexa - http://www.alexa.com (Also available as a toolbar)

PPC Research Tools

Free:

• Google Trafic Estimator - https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

Paid:

• SpyFu - http://www.spyfu.com

Other Tools

• TouchGraph - http://www.touchgraph.com

The simple answer is yes, if you want to keep your game alive. Many games have seen the amount of user’s online rise after adding an in-game chat; this has helped their game to become bigger and more successful.

User’s are more likely to stay if the game has an in-game chat which is built into the game and also has active members, new members like this simply because they can talk to the game owners, the staff and also other members.

So how should I setup in-game chat?

There are number of ways you could do it, but the simplest way is to get in contact with an IRC Network who will allow you to host your own chat channel for free on their server. We recommend iPocalypse, not just because they host CE Chat but also because of the friendly service and the nice community they have.

I want to use iPocalypse chat what do I do?

Firstly go to CE Chat then follow the instructions found here (if it asks you to register your nick go here). Then go here to add your chat to your site. You can also connect to your chat channel using mIRC, XChat or IceChat

For more information on how to use IRC these guides may help:

• Learn IRC in less than 1 hour!
• iPocalypse IRC Commands
• IRC Beginner

A big struggle in game design is finding the perfect color (colour) combinations.

Lucky there are some free tools on the web available to help make your job easier.

ColorCombos.com

colourlovers.com

ColorToy 2.0, a color scheme generator

colorbe.com

Colour palette generator based on an image you upload

Colordb the colour database

4096 color wheel

Colorhunter.com 

Color scheme generator2 

colorjack.com

Colors on the Web 

colorschemer.com

Colormixers.com 

colorblender.com 

kuler.adobe.com 

colr.org

pic2color.com 

krazydad.com/colrpickr