My Valentines Day gift made me work.

My wife got me probably the most excellent gift ever. I had seen the first version of this that came out a while back, and for whatever reason didn’t get it. Then totally forgot these cabinets existed until yesterday. So my head pretty much exploded when she gave this to me. Quick review: It is a thing of beauty. Feels VERY well made, not cheap. And dog-gone-it, the buttons and joystick really play like arcade controls. It couldn’t be better. Although if they make a third version in the future with some improvement like two joysticks, I could see myself getting it.

So after paying $10 for a collection of old Atari games that work with the button and joystick controls, I went crazy searching for more games that work with it. Pac-Man IS one of them  (which I already had ). And then, I realized,  ”wait… how come MY games don’t work with this?!”  And two hours later, one of them does (video proof below).

So AS SOON as my Angry Birds-style Game Starter Kit is done, I’ll post up how to get this working with your Cocos2D games. I found most everything I needed online already, but it won’t hurt to post even more tips for everyone. It is easy with the right code.

The big question: Any one else own one?

Force Perspective…Backwards.

Wanna know what that looks like. Check out this amazing video. Give it 20 seconds, and your brain will start to melt a little. And no, there’s no CGI trickery here…

Here’s how its done…

 

All of CartoonPaint’s tutorials for $25 AND another new app!

My friend Chad just told me all his site’s lessons are on sale in a big ol’ Holiday bundle for only $25…

Also Jeremy Hicks, who taught a lot of our After Effects courses and one of our first iPhone tutorials, has just released a VERY fun Yo Yo app. And this was made using Flash CS5.5 so Jeremy will be teaching a lesson soon on how to seriously optimize Flash for packaging an iOS app. And this app definitely has convinced me Flash can be used to develop a game with a great frame rate (which was previously a hurdle I ran into). So it’ll be interesting to see what Jeremy did to make this run so well.

Click to View in iTunes store

Today’s amazing illustrator is…

…Ramon Pla . I found this guy’s interview over at Web Design Shock , which has a lot more on him but I’ll swipe a few images for here. Really unique style… Or is it? Anyone know of some similar illustrators?

Great Time Lapse Illustration

Now if only there was instruction to this as well…

All hail rubble! ….

Click to see the rest

Latest pieces from Pumpkineer (is that a word yet?) Andy Gertler

You all might remember my  friend Andy. Many years ago I ran my freelance business using FlashBooty.com and when CartoonSmart took over, I gave that site over to Andy to run. Kind of a Dread-Pirate-Robert’s-thing. Well Andy is still in the reigns at FlashBooty, but he’s doing a lot of non-computer art  these days. And as usual around Halloween his medium is pumpkins. Here’s a gallery hosted by the Travel Channel’s website. And you guys can see Andy pretty regularly on the actual Travel Channel (the one on TV)  in reruns of Sand Masters. He’s one of the main cast that goes around the world making insane sand sculptures. Or sometimes making them fall apart.

Nobody destroys a YouTube page like Flash…

I gotta admit, I’m not sick of these yet. Still pretty creative to me. I like the fake comments too…

The Mirror effect, when isn’t it cool? And why isn’t it a Flash Filter?!

Check out these ad campaign photos from an airport in Germany. Pretty brilliant use of the floor’s natural reflection. It makes me think some modern-day Mad Man got a free trip to, well the airport, to “take in” the space for inspiration and just happened to notice they kept the floors all nice and polished.

Okay, thats my loose tie-in to a mini Flash rant. Just yesterday I was thinking how awesome it would be to have a mirror effect filter in Flash. Right now you can easily achieve that effect by copying the symbol, blurring it a tad, flipping it upside down and arranging it behind the primary object. But what would REALLY be easy would be to hit a Filter button, and not have to worry about keeping a separate symbol. And the Filter properties could be sliders for how blurry the mirror effect is, the clipping, the angle, etc.  So anyway, I was thinking about this, and then realized, wait…. we haven’t seen ANY new Filters since Flash 8. So, we’ve got Flash CS3, CS4, CS5, CS5.5 (ahem, more like CS5.05). So Adobe, throw us designers a bone. I know its hard to believe, but you actually have people like me that almost only use Flash to illustrate/design with.  And I don’t want to hear that a mirror effect can be done with Actionscript, because in my best Eric Cartman voice, my reply is “I care!”. Doing it with code, doesn’t gel with me as a designer, nor can I export out a PNG with code.

Rant over. Here’s those pics…

I need a book to try this with.

Dangit. None of my books are pulpy enough. Check out this work by Thomas Allen, photographer and prolific scissor user. He cuts up the covers of pulp books and makes them into art. Or I should say, makes them more artsy…. Click any below to see a whole lot more. 

A very cool Flash movie poster / motion poster

 

 

 

Just goes to show ya, sometimes the simpler, the better. This “motion poster” (click below to see the actual motion) feels fresh to me, and ALL it is really is looping fire and a fade in. The interactivity is only at the bottom, almost unseen,  so this keeps the feel of a movie poster. The previous one of these I’d seen was for Conan (check it out here) but it misses the mark a bit.