October 25th, 2009 by mrchrisallen

As I’m sure plenty of people have already heard, the new game we built, Star Wars: Trench Run, has recently been announced. You can check out the trailer on youtube, or read about the details of the game on starwars.com. Infrared5’s CTO Dominick Accattato and John Grden also both wrote nice blog posts on it. People really seem excited about the game too, which pretty much matches my own enthusiasm for it. It’s a top notch game, and I’ve not seen anything comparable on the app store. Our team really pushed the limits of what’s possible with the iPhone platform with this game, and I simply can’t wait for folks to get it in their hands.

So, with that, here’s a little info on the team that built the game. Infrared5’s senior engineer John Grden led the development, and acted as the overall lead on the project. Creating this game has been a dream of John’s long before the iPhone even came out. He poured everything he had into making this one of the best games out there. John is an avid Star Wars fan, as well as one of the most talented programmers I know. He made absolutely sure that every detail of the game is true to the original Star Wars Episode IV movie as possible. All sounds are the original ones, the modeling of the space crafts are exact and even elements like the color or Yavin are precise and true to the movie.

Of course, John couldn’t have built such a stellar game all by himself. Our creative director Rebecca Allen’s attention to the details and beautiful treatment of the graphics at every point in the game really make it an immersive experience. I in particular really like the unique design of the shields display, and the opening menu is one of the most inspiring that I’ve seen. Additional art elements like expert modeling, effects and texturing by Ben Throop, as well as, icons and production art by Lizzie Martin really add to the experience.

John, was also supported by our world class development team. Andy Zupko helped with optimizations, and used his math wizardry to make this game run well even on the limited resources of the iPhone 3G. Todd Anderson and Keith Peters, with their special Objective C prowess built out the UI, and Paul Gregoire did the leaderboard programming.

The core game engine uses Unity 3D. A huge thanks to Unity 3D team for creating this amazing development tool, without which the game never would have been completed as fast it was. The menus, and other elements of the game were done with native Objective C. The very fact that Unity allows for this type of interaction within the iPhone environment was key, and is one of its biggest strength. This is one aspect that I hope Adobe pays close attention to with the new Flash to iPhone stuff they are working on. (Note, I’m planning on writing a post on this subject. )

So, to the game itself. There hasn’t been a ton of information announced publicly on the game play yet. And, I’ve been reading various comments out there, with people’s concerns, suggestions and criticism. I would like to address some of the most frequent topics that have arisen:

• Is it a game that you will download and play a few times, complete the entire thing in 10 minutes and then never play it again? – No, it’s actually quite an addicting game, with a ton of replay value. The very fact that I’m still opening it up and shooting Tie Fighters after so many months of testing and development proves it. I should be done with the game at this stage, but no, I just can’t put the thing down. There’s one mission mode with several difficulty levels, and two arcade modes that get progressively harder and harder.
• Are the graphics really as good as shown in the trailer, or is it faked in the hopes that we get the game to that level before it launches? – Those are the real graphics. The game is actually done, and that trailer was made from a video feed of John Grden playing it on his iPod Touch 2nd generation device.
• When will Star Wars: Trench Run be released? - I wish I could tell you. It’s in Apple’s hands at the moment, and from what everyone at Lucas, THQ Wireless and Infrared5 knows, it could be released any day now.
• Will we support in app purchases, upgrades and new features in the game? - This is something that we are certainly considering. In fact please do post on the features you would like to see built. We will take all of them under consideration, and we will hopefully be able to get some of those in the game for your enjoyment. Of course this is not all up to me, but the main message here is that we are seriously thinking about it.

I look forward to hearing the feedback on the game once its released, and of course if you have more questions or suggestions, by all means, leave them in the comments here. If you are going to be at the Unity 3D conference this week. Let me know, as I will be there too! I’ve got the game on my phone of course; find me if you want to play it. John Grden is also doing a talk on Unity development there, and he will be showing off some more details of the game.

Infrared5, iPhone, Star Wars, Star Wars Trench Run

April 9th, 2009 by mrchrisallen

If you’ve not heard yet about Flash on Tap, the first ever beer festival and Flash conference, then man have you missed something big. But it’s not too late to get a ticket! We at Infrared5 and Influxis are putting together this stellar event with top notch speakers including Grant Skinner, Keith Peters, John Grden, Hoss Gifford, GMUNK, André Michelle, etc… as well as some of the best craft brewers in the country like Stone, Haverhill, Boulder and The Bruery (plus eleven others). Of course I’m also going to be presenting at the conference. It takes place on May 28 -30, 2009 in Boston, MA, USA.

So, if you’ve been thinking of attending Flash on Tap, but haven’t yet registered we have a deal for you! You can attend FREE when you register 5 or more people. And, your 4 friends each get $100 off their registration–that translates into $1,100 of savings! Email deb@flashontap.com to register your group!

I hope to see you there!

Flash, Flash on Tap

February 13th, 2009 by mrchrisallen

I suppose “switching” isn’t the right word; perhaps “adding to their repertoire” is a better description of what I’m talking about. Anyway, as many of you already know, we’ve been doing a lot of stuff with iPhone development lately at Infrared5. See our latest game iFly for example. Keith Peters, has been spending much of his free time developing cool games for the platform, and others on our team like John Grden and Andy Zupko are doing the same as well. It’s seems it’s not just Infrared5 guys either that are making this move. Mike Chambers, Peter Elst, Aral Balkan are just a few from the community that have been tinkering with the platform.

So, after reading Keith’s post on the subject, I thought I would ask how many of you guys out there are making this switch as well? Is this something that you are considering in the future? Are you using something like Unity 3D? And, why the iPhone? Please leave a response in the comments section.

Flash, iPhone

February 8th, 2009 by mrchrisallen

I just wanted to write a quick post saying how excited I am to announce iFly. This fast pased flying game is Infrared5’s first application to hit the Apple App Store. It is loosely based on the “Fly Me” feature on our website. Here’s a little video of John Grden showing off his flying skills with the game. Keep in mind that this is one the harder levels.

I want to thank John Grden, Rebecca Allen, Andy Zupko, Lizzie Martin, Hilary Michaels, Dominick Accattato, Keith Peters and Mike Oldham for making this thing possible. I know that John is planning on writing up a blog post on his experience developing the game. Expect to see that in the next day or two. In the meantime, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, go get iFly now, and give it a great review! I think you will find it as fun and addicting as I do. Of course, as always, I would love to hear your feedback in the comments here as well.

iFly, Infrared5, iPhone

January 20th, 2009 by mrchrisallen

If today wasn’t already exciting enough with the inauguration of President Barack Obama, Adobe announced that they would be opening the Real Time Messaging Protocol to the public. This is great news in my opinion, and it legitimizes (from Adobe’s perspective) projects like Red5.

I really don’t have much more to add to this at the moment, except to say well done Adobe! And thank you for listening!

Adobe, Flash, Red5, RTMP

January 3rd, 2009 by mrchrisallen

Happy 2009 everyone! I just wanted to quickly thank John Grden (site architecture), Keith Peters (3D books and video section), Lizzie Martin (production) and Rebecca Allen (Art Direction and Design) for their hard work on the newest features on infrared5.com. We’ve released some brand new content which I think is pretty cool, so go check it out when you have a chance. More to come on this front in the next couple of months! Stay tuned!

December 26th, 2008 by mrchrisallen

I’m sure by now many of you have seen John Grden’s post on Unity and how he thinks that Adobe should buy them. If you haven’t, then I suggest you read it. The post goes into the reasons that John, Andy and the rest of us at Infrared5 think that Unity is a really viable platform, and a major competitor to Flash, in particular for entertainment based sites. Of course being able to deploy to the iPhone is a major feature as well.

What’s interesting is the amount of positive feedback John got in the comments. Lee Brimelow  from Adobe had some interesting feedback and some questions as well:

“So I’ve played with the IDE a little and looked at the (amazing) examples. But are you guys seeing this as a potential Flash replacement, or just as an alternative for doing 3D games?

I guess what I mean is can this engine build RIAs and all the other stuff Flash can do? Flash was never intended to be the best place to make 3D games. Of course the work John and the PV3D guys have done have changed that quite a bit. But there has always been better places to make 3D games in the browser, including our very own Director product.

Another point to throw out there is even if we did, or could, get a technology like this, what would we do with it? Roll it all into the Flash Player? Keep it as a separate 3D game plugin?

BTW, I’m asking these questions because I honestly don’t know the answers. I’m looking for feedback on what you guys think.”

Great questions Lee! Here’s my take on this:

This comment in particular struck me as strange: “Flash was never intended to be the best place to make 3D games.” Flash in its early stages was intended as an animation tool for the web, and this evolved into many other things throughout its life due to people in the community taking the technology and pushing it in new directions. I’m very certain that the original creators of Future Splash weren’t thinking of creating a tool for building Rich Internet Applications. 3D is just the latest breakthrough by the community (Papervision3D, Away3D, etc…)

Unity is obviously much better at rendering 3D than Flash at the moment, but it also has other less apparent advantages that could be exploited.

The networking layer is one huge difference. Instead of taking a proprietary approach with streaming media (RTMP and all its variants), Unity uses open standards (Ogg Vorbis), supports full UDP, and it supports true peer to peer with no additional service/server needed like Adobe’s new RTMFP protocol. So in addition to 3D/Games sites, I can really see Unity taking off in the world of streaming media as well. Flash still has some advantages in this area including accessing the webcam and microphone of a client’s computer and being able to stream that, but one would hope that this is a feature that Unity is also looking at adding in the future.

So, now to RIAs. Currently the Flash platform has a clear advantage in this area, but that doesn’t mean that folks in the community aren’t going to start building UI components for Unity. Once this happens, who knows what Unity might look like a few years from now.

Whether Adobe decides to buy Unity or not, they should clearly look at this as competition and learn from it.

As always, I would love to hear feedback from the community on this, as well as from Unity and Adobe respectively.

Flash, Unity3D

December 23rd, 2008 by mrchrisallen

Yesterday I was chatting with Ted Patrick about iPhone development, and how our company Infrared5 is starting to develop games for the platform. We are currently using Unity 3D, as it’s very powerful and has a nice way to deploy to the iPhone runtime, and the 3D support is amazing. I pointed out to Ted that all Adobe really needs to do is create binaries from the SWF that work as an iPhone application. Essentially doing this the same way Unity is now. So the workflow would be something like this:

• Create an iPhone project in Flex Builder (or the Flash IDE) much the same way you would choose to build an AIR project
• Code your application in AS3 in Flex Builder using some APIs that would be specific to the iPhone
• Compilation would happen when building the project, but would create binaries that could be deployed to the iPhone
• Right-click on the MXML or main AS3 class and Run/Debug as iPhone app
• A nifty little tool that simulates the iphone would open up with your app running in it
• Deployment would use all of Apple’s tools (probably simplified with a handy Ant Task)

Flash, iPhone, Unity3D

December 13th, 2008 by mrchrisallen

Paul Tondeur recently posted on his experiments in implementing RTMP in C# on the Unity3D platform. Paul and his team have a great start on some really exciting ways of creating multi-user 3D content for the web, and I commend them on sharing what they are up to.

So, why would you want to do this in the first place? Unity3D simply adds many capabilities that Flash can’t currently handle on the 3D and graphics front, and if that’s not enough, Unity3D can be deployed on the iPhone. But, Flash still has its place as well given it’s ubiquity and ease with which you can create great UIs.

Creating communication with Flash, Unity3D and Red5 has been something we’ve been looking into as well at Infrared5. We are thinking of taking a different approach than Paul on this, and will simply add Unity support directly to Red5. By doing so we can start to take advantage of some of the protocols that Unity Supports like UDP, which simply isn’t possible with the RTMP protocol.

If anyone has any good open source examples of servers written to work with Unity I would appreciate a link. We will be sure to keep people posted on our progress. I’m sure that Red5, Flash and Unity3D have a bright future together.

Flash, Red5, Unity3D

November 13th, 2008 by mrchrisallen

Well, it’s not a real airplane, and it’s made of paper (OK pixels then), but it’s damn fun to fly. It also shows off some killer interaction that can be done with Flash. Check out the newest addition to the Infrared5 site by clicking on “FLY ME” at the top right corner of a page once the site has loaded.

Thanks to Rebecca Allen for the great design/concept, and to John Grden and Andy Zupko for taking on the challenge to build this. Dominick Accattato also made a great blog post on the subject.

Expect some more exciting additions to http://infrared5.com soon.

Flash, Infrared5, Papervision3D