Flash and Muscians go hand in hand

When ever I talk to a Flasher at a conference, about 95% of them are muscians.  It’s such an oddity, that I went out and bought FlashDrummers.com and FlashMusicians.com in hopes of providing a place where flash and music/drumming could come together.  Well, I ran out of time and never did anything with those URL’s   And then there’s the “Flash 5 Experiment” band that’s played 2 conferences now that include a whole host of well know flash developers

But I HAVE done music based applications like the drumming tool and the virtual 3D guitar using Red5 and Papervision3D.  Well, to continue my efforts in marrying the 2 worlds I love so much (coding and music), I’ve put out an iPhone/iTouch app that’s kept my two kids in total competition for a week now!

Main Screen

Instructions

It’s called “5 seconds” and you basically play your device with any 2 fingers you like to see how fast you are in 5 seconds.  This is the real deal – your Beats Per Second is matched against world class speeds and if you’re fast enough, you could even break into world record speeds (over 20bps is consider world record speed).

Anyway, I KNOW there’s a ton of flash drummers and musicians out there with ego’s and need an outlet to silence the posers – am I right?!  My best time is 18.2 so far and it took me a week to break 17.2bps – once you get over 16, it becomes exponentially harder to get faster!

Please post your times here and if you do a video on youtube, use the tag “5SecondsToGlory” so everyone can find it!  ROCK ON \m/

Results Screen

Rankings:
< 5bps : A Drummer, you are not.
< 10bps : Garage Band Drummer.
< 15bps : Drum Corp Material.
< 17.5bps : Elite.
< 20bps : World Class.
> 20bps : WORLD RECORD!

All other info can be found HERE!

iFly: From Flash to Unity3D to iPhone game!

iFly Launch Pad

Well, its finally out in the iTunes App Store as reported by Keith Peters!.  I’m pretty excited about how it turned out.  It runs at a solid 28-30fps on my 1st gen iPhone as well as my 3G iTouch.

The idea is simple enough:  fly through as many gray rectangles as you can and land on the landing pad (circle that looks like a man hole cover) before the time runs out.  If you do, you get 5000 extra points.  If you miss the man hole or don’t make it to the bottom, you don’t get the bonus points.  if you go through the red rectangles, you loose points and points are scored according to the size of the rectangle – the smaller they are, the more points you get.

The Crippler (3rd in the hard levels) rocks \m/  -  Chris had me beat with 8800 for a day, then I smoked him with 9600.  It’s a fun one where you basically dive bomb the entire way just to make it to the bottom in time!

The cool part about this that we pulled the same 3D model and code for creating the rectangles that we have on the infrared5 web site ( click “fly me”  to fly paper airplane ) right into Unity3D and with a few syntax tweaks, it was up and running!  Since Unity3D has strictly typed version of Javascript, it’s practically ActionScript3 with some slight differences that are a non-issue.  Most of the time was spent optimizing the game and getting the UI straightened out.  Unity’s GUI controls are ok and if you’re familiar with CSS, you’ll probably jump right in without too much problem.  Though in saying that, doing things like fades on 2D textures isn’t exactly as straight forward as it is with Flash.  But it IS doable.

Total time invested was approx 4 weeks.

flying around in "The Abyss"

Landing on the main hole cover