We are currently scheduling meetings for individuals, studios or publishers who would like to meet up with us to talk about anything PushButton related! We cover a lot of areas such as PushButton Engine Licensing, Game Development, Social Gaming, Flash Gaming, as well as our various game properties (The Incredible Machine, Grunts, The Great Games Experiment). PushButton will only be in town through the morning of Thursday the 11th and our schedule is filling up fast! If you would like to schedule a time to sit down with any of the PBL guys in person feel free to drop us a line at tima@pushbuttonlabs.com. See you at the show!

PushButton Engine @ Flash Gaming Summit

PushButton Engine is an open source game framework for Flash. It is used in several social games, among them hive7’s YouTopia, Zynga’s Fishville, and an upcoming Playdom title. Learn about its design, strengths and weaknesses, and how it can save you time and effort on your next project.

Flash Gaming Summit is being held on March 8th, 2010 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. You can find more information about the event (as well as register) at the Flash Gaming Summit website. Hope to see you there!

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — 12/08/09 – Today, Mochi Media announced the Flash Gaming Summit 2010, which will be held on March 8 at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. The second annual conference will bring together leaders of the Flash gaming industry to share ideas and insights about the future of Flash in front of an audience of game developers, artists, entrepreneurs, investors and game publishers.

Mochi Media CEO and co-founder Jameson Hsu will give the keynote address at the conference, titled “The Future of Flash Games,” and the summit will also feature a return of the “The Mochis Award Show,” sponsored by Kongregate, recognizing the best Flash games of 2009 across 11 categories. Nominations are now open for these games.

“We were overwhelmed by the positive response to last year’s Flash Gaming Summit, and this year we look forward to raising the bar and creating an even better event,” Hsu said. “With the rapid evolution and change in the online games industry, a lot has changed since last year and we anticipate explosive industry growth in the coming year. To have the best and brightest minds in the industry coming together at this event at such a pivotal time is really exciting.”

Flash Gaming Summit’s Advisory Board includes Ben Garney (PushButton Labs), Danielle Deibler (Adobe), David Scott (Casual Collective), Jim Greer (Kongregate), Matthew Annal (Nitrome), and Tom Fulp (NewGrounds).

Adobe is the premier sponsor for the event and FlashGameLicense is a platinum sponsor. Additional sponsors include Zynga, Kongregate, MindJolt, Armor Games, Candystand, Hero Interactive, and Zong.

For more information about the Flash Gaming Summit please visit http://www.flashgamingsummit.com or follow @fgsummit on Twitter. Speaking submissions will be accepted now through January 15, 2010.

About Flash Gaming Summit

Flash Gaming Summit is a conference focused on fostering the growth and success of the Flash games community. It was established to bring together industry leaders to share industry insights and strategies around game development and the business of making games. Flash Gaming Summit is organized by Mochi Media. Learn more at www.flashgamingsummit.com.

About Mochi Media

Mochi Media is the world’s largest casual online game network, serving the needs of thousands of Flash developers, reaching over 100 million unique users each month with a library of over 14,000 games, and enabling advertisers to reach engaged consumers with targeted display, text, and video ads. The company’s Flash game development products and services provide developers with tools to track distribution and usage analytics, enable version control and live updates to distributed games, and provide monetization via micro-transactions and real-time insertion of pre-game and in-game ads. Mochi Media’s developers gain distribution opportunities to over 30,000 Web sites, as well as monetization opportunities by sharing in the ad and micro-transaction revenue generated by their games. Mochi Media is headquartered in downtown San Francisc

Press Contacts:
Corey Lewis or Christopher Schreiber
LaunchSquad
(415) 625-8555
mochimedia(at)launchsquad(dot)com

PushButton Labs’ Ben Garney will be running a BYOL session Wed, Oct. 7, at 4pm on “Building a Flash Based Platformer in 90 Minutes.” You will get some hands on time with the PushButton Engine, a preview copy of the Platformer Starter Kit, and end up building a platformer that looks a lot like this:

If you’re going to be at MAX and want to talk Flash games, post in our forums, e-mail us at engine at pushbuttonlabs dot com, or DM us at @pushbuttonlabs.

In other news, PushButton Engine revision 470 is out! This release is a big step forward from r189 - it will feel like a whole new engine. A few of the bigger changes include:

• Vastly simplified installation process. No more Engine Manager - just add the contents of src/ to your project!
• Improved documentation - including getting started guides for Flash CS4, Flex/Flash Builder, and FlashDevelop, as well as videos introducing parts of the engine.
• Conformed to the Adobe Flex Code Style Guide - code is more intuitive and easier to work with.

You can read more about r470 in its release thread on the forums, or you can download r470 today!

First off, we’ve posted several short videos with high level explanations of how PushButton Engine works. If you’ve read the code but still aren’t clear on the big picture and have 5 minutes to spare, these might help. There are three so far:

• Understanding Component in PBE
• Resources in PBE
• User Interfaces in PBE

We’re working on more, so visit our forums and let us know what to cover next!

Have you ever wanted to listen to people talk about the PushButton Engine for extended periods of time? Well, your dreams just came true! Joseph Burchett from Game Developer’s Radio interviewed Ben Garney, lead developer of PushButton Engine, and asked him a bunch of interesting questions about PBE and Flash games. Give it a listen!

Finally, if you haven’t been keeping up with our SVN repository, you might want to start. Since our last release, we’ve had 269 commits from a dozen community members! We’re working on getting ready for another release, but the code in SVN is ready for the adventurous to use now. Docs are in progress for the next release; we have five new lessons. Three are on getting started with Flash CS4, FlashDevelop, and Flex Builder. The remaining two are on working with keyboard input and using and embedding images. They’re only going to work with the latest code from SVN, but when the new release is out, they’ll be on the official docs page and ready to go.

Thanks for reading!

The PushButton Engine component store is a place where developers are able to buy and sell resources related to the development of Flash games. Through the purchase of these libraries, content packs, and more, game creators can easily get the parts necessary to compile a professional and unique product. The goal of the store is to facilitate a channel through which technology and game developers can buy and sell components for functionality that they wish to provide to others and/or include in their game. By selling components on the PushButton Engine component store, developers are able to open a revenue stream, making available products to the vast market of Flash developers. Through the purchase and use of components, game makers are able to easily obtain functionality they wish to introduce into their product. (In its current form, the component store is not yet accepting community submitted products, but soon, once terms have been established, this ability will exist for all developers.)

The first premium component to released in the PushButton Engine component store is the PushButton Networking Component. PBNetworking is the result of applying years of experience in high-end first person shooter networking to multiplayer Flash games. It’s a great way of getting a networked game up and running in Flash with high quality and low pain. Run the same ActionScript 3 code on client and server, and quickly develop an optimized network protocol to maximize your network resources. Check out the official feature list to learn more about how PushButton Networking is designed to help you build great multiplayer games.

With the launch of the store, we have also provided a number of components for free under the MIT license. Among these is the
Google Spreadsheet Tweaker that PushButton Labs, are currently using in the development of Grunts: Skirmish. Also launching with the store are the Box2d, Rendering2d, and
State Machine and Health components, all available for free under the MIT License.

As far as licensing goes, components on the store may contain a number of licenses. Each product may be licensed as a free component, under the LGPL, Zlib, or MIT licenses. For premium components, (those with a dollar amount attached to them,) both Indie and Commercial licenses are possible. Selection of license variations is completely at the hands of the creators of components. In the words of Ben Garney, “Price it high or low and let the market decide what it’s worth. We think that many components will be free, but some will be pay… and well worth the money.”

To make the process of buying components as simple as possible, we have partnered up with Amazon.com for our payment system. Through this association, you are able to use your Amazon.com account to make purchases. No hassle of having to enter your credit card to yet one more site! We know you already have an account with Amazon for buying all those handy Flash development books; now you can use that same account seamlessly to hook up with awesome resources from the PushButton Engine component store.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Matthew (you know who you are!) for being our first customer to make a purchase from the store! For those members of the community who have made purchases so far, we will be getting in touch so that we can send you one of our awesome PushButton Labs t-shirts! It’s great to have such a vibrant community working with our tools and so interested in the trail we’re blazing in the Flash game development community. Now get out there, visit the component store, download the engine, and share what you’re working on in our community forums!

Cool Projects:

Mine Enemy by Clint Herron

S’troidz! (Week 1 Update) by Phil Perron

Rolly Ball Game by Ben Garney

Yet Another Tetris Clone by Doki

Great Threads & Resources:

HanClintoLib v0.3 by Clint Herron

Ant Build Files by Ian P.

Embedding Fonts in Flex by Ben Garney

New Beginner PBE Lessons by Clint Herron

Getting Started Guide for Flash CS4 by Ben Garney (in Japanese by Hiroki)

Improved 2D Sprite Rendering by Lithander

Componetizing Flint Particles for PBE by Faust

Awesome forum threads!

Lastly, in case you haven’t been around for awhile or missed it, there has been some awesome new “getting started” style tutorials put into the Docs area submitted by great community members.

New Tutorials:

Flex Builder Setup Tutorial by Jeremy Easoz

FlashDevelop Setup Tutorial by Jeremy Easoz

Lesson #2 Adding a Simple Shape by Clint Herron

Lesson #3 Adding Control with a Custom Component by Clint Herron

Keep on rocking guys!

We got a lot of great feedback from you community members, and addressed as much as we could in this update as well as the usual round of bugfixes and enhancements. Here’s just a few of the changes that made it in to this release:

• Added a bunch of new content to the manual and refreshed the API reference.
• It’s now even easier to use PushButton Engine for experienced developers: just grab the SWCs out of the Library folder and go.
• We added a slick demo game that shows how to implement sound effects, custom physics, scorekeeping, custom preloader, multiple levels, pausing and more - visit the RollyBall Game Showoff Thread to play it.
• Supports pure ActionScript or Flex projects.
• Project Manager renamed to Engine Manager and significantly updated. No longer have to use Engine Manager for common scenarios.
• Many improvements to Rendering2D and other parts of the engine.

Many thanks to everyone who helped with this release! There is a release thread in the forums if you would like to post your feedback/comments/congratulations.

Now go and make something cool!

Of course, we’ve been building games for years, so we said hi to our more traditional game development brethren, too. It’s very interesting looking at the Flash space - in a year, there will be a lot more “old school” game developers doing Flash. The crowd at Flash Gaming Summit was young (and passionate) compared to the game dev scene as a whole. It’s going to be a lot of fun watching Flash grow up.

At the Game Developer’s Conference, it was amazing how seriously people took what we’re doing in the Labs. I was expecting people to kind of blow us off - “who needs a Flash game engine?” But nearly everyone we talked to was very interested in our technology and business model. Jeff Tunnell wrote a great introduction to our vision for the engine. We even got tracked down by James Au of GigaOM - read his coverage of the PushButton Engine.

What about the engine? Well, we found a few bugs since the last release, and we learned an important fact at the Flash Gaming Summit - that a lot of developers still use pure ActionScript and the Flash IDE. Version 36 of PushButton Engine is out - you can read the release announcement on our forums, but the main highlights are: support for pure AS3 development (for instance from the Flash IDE), SWCs are included for easier integration with Flash/FlashDevelop, and a ton of usability bugs from the last update have been fixed.

Go check out the engine!

Image by Blakespot

Every game stands on the shoulders of giants. Every game is based on technology and ideas that have come before. Our component store brings the convenience of the iPhone App Store to the world of game development.

Need a physics library? Grab one from the store, drop it into your game, and start making it fun. Need a particle system? Grab some particle components and get started right away. Sound effects or art? Get it and go.

Some components will be free, and others will be pay. Some will be developed by PushButton Labs, but the majority will be from developers just like you. The store is open to everyone - upload your components and start selling them right away. The store will be integrated into our editor as well as available on our website, so using it will be quick and convenient.