Good news for Flash game developers, Adobe recently launched a dedicated portal on its website dedicate to Flash Game Technology which hosts a videos, articles, and discussion boards to help Flashers develop their skills in making games. The portal has both Flash CS and Flash Builder tutorials. You can view the Flash Platform Game Technology Center here.

[via swfGeek]

 Wonderfl is an online service/community that lets you code and live compile Flash games using ActionScript 3.0 online without having Flash orFlex installed on your machine. Using Wonderful you can view the code of games created by other people, download it as an ActionScript file, or even “fork” it to create your own remixed code of the game. Wonderfl is a great place for learning how to create games by examining the code of other people. Make sure you check it out if you are interested in ActionScript 3 or Flash games.

[via CrunchGear]

 Heyzap is a new Flash game publisher that provides game developers with an easy method for creating and sharing their games using blog and social media friendly widgets. If you have a Flash game you can create your widget by uploading your SWF to their website, specify a name, description, width and height and then just waiting for your game to get approved by Heyzap. I tested their dashboard and it is really simple and easy to use, but the statistics features seemed to only have the number of times a game played without any graphs for trends, referrals, or any other advanced stats. 

Heyzap is also partnering up with MochiMedia, which lets Flash game developers monetize their games, so that advertisements served through this network can be viewable through the Heyzap widgets.

If you are interested in creating some widgets for your Flash games then maybe you should check out them.

[via TechCrunch]

 Auditorium is an awesome example of how a simple Flash game can be fun to play, relaxing, and beautiful to look at AND listen to. This is only supposedly a demo for the fun game that is in the making. The concept of the game is self-expanatory once you see it. Click here to play Auditorium.

Atmosphir is a new gaming development platform that was announced at the recent TechCrunch50 conference. The interesting thing about it is that it lets you create rich 3D platform games (which are very similar to Mario 64) by simply dragging and dropping Lego-like blocks on a virtual canvas. The video above shows gameplay and development tools and they both seem quite fun. Games created on Atmosphere can be shared on the platform’s website to let others play and/or edit them if they wish. 

Atmosphir games are created and played using a desktop client for PC and Mac which is currently only available in a private beta (you can sign up for an invitation here). The client will be available for free once the project is fully launched towards the end of 2008.

For more info on Atmosphir you can visit their official website or view the transcript of the Q&A session of Atmosphir during TechCrunch50.

We have been keeping a little secret here at Oman3D about a new project that we launched at the start of April during the annual eGames conference held at the Knowledge Oasis Muscat. This secret is about Chemical Orange, a portal for playing free mobile phone created using Flash Lite.

The idea behind Chemical Orange is to make games which are representative of our local Omani culture and  yet simple and fun to play. We think that we were successful in doing that. We got linked to by one of the two mobile phone operators in the country and our games were downloaded more than 50,000 times within a period that did not exceed three weeks. This is counting only downloads made over-the-air and not downloads made from the actual website. We also do not DRM our games, so users can save them and share them with their friends as they please.

We currently have two games in our catalog, both of which are made using Flash Lite 1.1 to ensure the highest number of compatible devices. We created the games using Flash CS3 and tested using Device Central CS3, two tools that proved the excellence of Adobe’s tools in the field of mobile content production.

We provided users with two methods for downloading the games, the first is by visiting our regular Flash website, select the phone model to download the appropriate game version and then leave the user to transfer the game to his phone as he sees fit, the second method is by downloading the game directly over the air by visiting the mobile portal of Chemical Orange, select the game and phone model and then just play.

Our games also feature a highscore  board feature that lets users submit their score and have their name shown if they get a score within the top five.

You can check out Chemical Orange by visiting our full website or alternatively by visiting m.chemicalorange.com from your mobile phone browser. All our games are free of charge, so you have no excuse not to try them out!

We had an awesome time at eGames yesterday, the annual gaming conference organised by the Knowledge Oasis Muscat. It was a great opportunity to meet people interested in gaming and technology and it was also a opportunity to hear about the latest applications of serious gaming (gaming for educational purposes), virtual reality gaming, and gaming for the promotion of heritage and culture in the UK. And oh yeah, there was a bit on mobile phone gaming, but we’ll talk about that in another post.

The eGames conference is not your average gaming expo, you will not likely hear about the latest PS3 or Wii game in it, but instead it will hear a lot about using games for creating new effective methods for teaching, the usage of gaming for spread and preserving art and culture, and the usage of gaming for the promotion of tourism.

The majority of speakers were experts in alternative uses of gaming from the UK. Interesting examples were showcased by PIXELearning illustrating the possibility to create effective training programs using virtual words such as a GTA-like game used to train medical staff.

The second most discussed topic at eGames was the use of gaming for the promotion of tourism and culture, which is a topic that our country Oman could benefit easily benefit from if implemented well. Oman is a country rich with culture and unique architecture which the world would enjoy seeing and exploring in cyberspace for sure.

eGames first day was concluded by a session of mobile phone games, which we will discuss in a separate post for reason’s you will soon know! You can learn more about the topics discussed at eGames by viewing the conference’s blog here.

New details are emerging about the upcoming eGames 2008 conference to be held next month in Muscat. Profiles of key speakers can now be seen on the eGames Oman Blog, such key speakers include David Wortley – Director of the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University; Professor Lizbeth Goodman – Founder and Director of the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute and the MAGIC Multimedia & Games Innovation Center, Gamelab and PLAYroom; Dr Sara de Freitas – Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute at the University of Coventry; Mike Gogan – Blitz Games; Dick Davies – Executive Producer of Ambient Performance; and many other experts who will share their experience in the fields of gaming for education purposes (serious gaming), using virtual reality games for the promotion of tourism, and mobile phone gaming.

You can learn more about of these speakers and the eGames conference on the eGames Oman Blog.

Playyoo, the social network for playing and creating mobile phone games using the Flash Lite platform, has recently finally bypassed its private testing phase and can now be accessed as a beta launch by anyone. The easiest way to think of Playyoo is as a YouTube for Flash Lite games: anybody can upload their own Flash Lite games or even build one using the online game creator available on the website. All the games are then available for the public to download for free on their mobile phones. We did not try uploading a Flash Lite game to Playyoo, but playing games from its mobile portal was a breeze. Flash Lite developers looking for inspiration or a place to publish their games on should seriously check it out.

[via TechCrunch]

Knowledge Oasis Muscat (KOM) has announced that its annual gaming conference eGames will be held on the 31st of March and the 1st of April 2008 at KOM HQ in Rusail. (See our coverage of the last eGames here.) The conference will focus as usual on gaming for education purposes, gaming for the promotion of tourism, and mobile gaming – all of which are fields that the Sultanate of Oman and local business could make use of.

The sessions of the conference will be delivered by a number of academics, virtual reality game developers, and telecom industry professionals. A workshop on Second Life on the second day of the conference will be conducted by David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute of Coventry University.

Conference entry fees, if any would be charged, have not been announced yet. Conference updates will be posted on the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE) Blog.