The one (and only) counter-argument I’ve heard against SWF protection goes something like this:

It doesn’t matter what you do, thieves will always be able to steal your work, so don’t bother with SWF protection.

This is a textbook example of the “perfect solution” fallacy. Thieves will always be able to crack safes, so why bother storing your money and valuables in them? And of course encryption can always be cracked, so why bother using it when transferring valuable information? Why not just release all your work and hard-earned assets out to the wild for anyone to plunder, since apparently it will be plundered regardless of whatever you do to protect it?

Why try?

Obviously we use safes and encryption &c to minimize the chances of bad things happening to our precious stuff. It’s just the same for people like me who make money with SWF files–I don’t want anyone stealing my Intellectual Property and posting it elsewhere, claiming it as their own, so I do everything I can to make the process of stealing my SWF files as difficult as possible. The more difficult a thing is to steal, the less chance there is of it being stolen–and less often.

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This is a quick run-down on the status of the financial options that are available to independent developers who don’t have massive marketing budgets or corporate support. Please post a comment below and let us know how your experience has been with these options (or others I’ve missed).

Flattr

The latest option is a general-purpose micro-donation system called Flattr. It takes the “like”/”retweet” interactive device and applies it micro-funding. Watch this video (1.8 minutes; opens a lightbox) to see how it works; or here’s a summary:

1. Once invited/registered, you fill your monthly “means” account with some money. The devs like to call this account cake.
2. Whenever you click on a Flattr button, a slice of your cake is given to the thing associated with that button.
3. At the end of every month, your cake is sliced evenly and distributed among all the things you flattr’d that month.
4. Likewise, you will receive money from people who flattr’d YOUR content.

You always have to have some cake to give in order to get some cake yourself. That’s the gist, and so far it’s working well. Of the 15k or so users, many got €100 for a month and thousands more got more Euros than they spent (other currencies forthcoming–Flattr is still in invite-only beta). Pretty good considering this service just launched last month (March 2010) and it’s still in private/invite-only beta.

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Ultimately, content is a banana and we’re all a bunch of monkeys :: photo by hvhe1 ::

Some loud dude (Ryan Creighton of Untold Entertainment fame) recently posted this article, claiming that content is actually “peasant” (rather vehemently) and that meta-aggregators (he simply calls them aggregators of aggregators) and advertisers are the ones at the top of the commerce chain. I’m going to question that conclusion here.

So. Why would people say content is king in the first place? I think it’s because advertisers, aggregators, meta-aggregators, and, uhm, salesmen (whom Sir Creighton says are the real kings, which we’ll simply call the 3 Horsemen–yes I ignored salesmen) would all be dead without content. That’s a pretty well-established fact. I mean, Creighton is right in that the 3 Horsemen are essentially clever leeches and content producers rather strong-headed asses, but it’s telling how he calls content the “vehicle”–without the vehicle, nobody moves. So there’s definitely some meat to the idea that content is, in fact, king because everything else feeds off of it, and it’s not possible to run it the other way around… unless you want to advertise ads… but then the ads would become content by definition.

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When I set out to write a very simple Pixel Bender (PB) kernel/script thingy, I expected it to be relatively straight-forward, mostly because Adobe has been so good writing quality documentation for its products and/or there is a wealth of info on their products produced by their users. Unfortunately I didn’t find the dev guide in the Help menu and I missed some key AS3 bits from the links I’ll post below, but even so I still had a lot of trouble finding some info that really should already have been out on the interwebs. So this post is to fill in the gaps when going from AS3 to Pixel Bender.
Hope it helps

Best resources for beginners

Here’s the best tutorials and explanations I’ve found so far:

• The official guide and reference. Slap that F1 key! Also, don’t forget the Help menu in the toolkit like I did (there’s the PB-specific language spec and dev guide there).
• Using PB as a calculator. Completes the official tutorial.
• Great in-depth article with general+performance tips.
• Very straight-forward examples + comedy. Can’t go wrong there.
• Nice user article on optimizations and some speed tests (turns out, for input bitmapData beats ByteArray beats Vector.)

Syntax overview

As a casual programmer of high-level languages and no mid- to low-level ones, I was thrown off by PB’s awkward syntax. It’s strongly typed, which is fine, except I’m not familiar with low-level languages like C or any previous shader language (PB is based on GLSL from what I hear). Here’s a basic difference:

AS3: var i:Number = 12;
…in PB is: float i = 12.0;
The decimal in 12.0 tells PB it’s a floating point number. If it was just 12 PB would think it’s an int.

When dealing with “vectors” (which are arrays, as in Flash 10’s odd use of the word “vector”) it’s float2 i = float2(12.0, 2.0). Notice there’s no brackets or anything suggesting any type of array present. It’s simply the type + how big the array is, eg float3. It goes up to 4, for the 4 channels in images: Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). Then, as you can see, intializing the array is a simple matter of putting in the numbers you said would be there. So float4(1.0, 24.2, 0.1, 3.4) is valid whereas float2(1.0, 24.2, 2) is not, because there’s an extra number in there and it’s an int (adding insult to injury).

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Makin’ games

I’ve been working on a couple game concepts and want to prototype a few more before committing to one to build out. I’ve been hacking the hell out of Flixel, which I’ve decided to use for a most of the games. There’s a screenshot of game3 on the right there. Weird, eh? Also fugly, but it’s placeholder art so there. I have a new collision detection system for it that I’ll be posting about eventually (at least, I’ve never heard of it before).

The microtransaction (MTX) dilemma

I’m really excited about all the new services that have been released to allow Flash developers to monetize their games through microtransactions. I fucking hate ads, plus the ROI of them in Flash games is usually shit. Many many years ago I knew microtransactions (MTX) were the future of digital content and I’m pleased to see the idea coming to the mainstream (in America at least, Asia was quicker on it as usual).

The problem I’m seeing with MTX is that Flash developers need to try a lot harder by making much bigger games in order to really reap the rewards. Before, you could make a pretty simple, fun and addictive game and monetize it easily with ads. But with MTX, you can’t do that as easily since you need to build more content for players to buy into. For example, to me, putting premium content in a Tower Defense game isn’t viable–the game concept is so small that I doubt anyone is going to pay anything for more turrets or maps (for example). There just isn’t enough game there.

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