This is a character prototype for an upcoming game from drawlabs illustrated and coded by Ryan Christensen.

This character is one of the players and I can’t tell you much more about it other than it has penguin secret agents in it and it will be available on iphone and on  the web.

Because the game is always scaling the view the characters need to be able to be identifiable from large to small.  In most cases if this was just for Flash for the web I would go total vector but for the iphone version it is bitmap to smoothing and swapping out might be necessary at varying levels.

pyamf is pretty sweet for Flash remoting with Pythonic server side, but now we have two nicely done and integrated remoting kits for python on the server side.

amfast is a new remoting library  that looks to be as sweet as pyamf (where sweet == fast and useful).  I am checking out amfast now but the speed boost alone might be worth it.  For instance, working with real-time games, when you need static content you need to grab that quickly sometimes via a content service.  The faster that link the better. It also has Twisted integration which is great for networking and SQLAlchemy integration which is in my opinion the best ORM for python (pyamf has twisted, django, pylons, sqlalchemy as well)

amfast is well documented and has some great examples.  If you have the Python addiction, check it.

Description

• AmFast is a Flash remoting framework for Python.
• AmFast can use AMF to communicate between Python and Flash, Flex, and any other system that supports AMF.
• AMF is a binary object serialization protocol used by Actionscript based applications.

Server Features

• Support for NetConnection and RemoteObject RPC.
• Support for Producer/Consumer ‘push’ messaging with HTTP polling, HTTP long-polling, and real-time HTTP streaming channels.
• Support for authentication with NetConnection and RemoteObject.
• Flexible Target mapping system to map message destinations to invokable Target objects.
• Support for ChannelSets with multiple Channels to expose resources in different ways.
• Built in Channels for CherryPy, Twisted Web, and plain WSGI.
• Support for configurable Endpoints. Use AmFast’s built-in AMF encoder/decoder C-extension, or use an external AMF encoder/decoder, such as PyAmf for a pure-Python implementation.

AMF Encoder/Decoder Features

• AMF0/AMF3 encoder/decoder written in C as a Python extension for speed.
• More than 10x faster than the PyAmf encoder/decoder (even when using PyAmf’s optional C-extension).
• Map custom classes with ClassDef objects for complete control over serialization/de-serialization.
• Full support for IExternalizable objects.
• Data persistence with SqlAlchemy including remotely-loadable lazy-loaded attributes.
• Actionscript code generation from ClassDef objects.

MochiAds is one of the most used and community friendly companies for monetizing web games.  Today they released another great tool that I actually saw while playing some games on bigpoint.com, the new feature is facebook friend integration with the leaderboards.

This could prove useful for popular games or games popular among your friends adding that extra competitive stat view.

*drawlabs is a small game development studio located in Chandler, Arizona doing primarily web based games in Flash, Flex, Silverlight, Unity3d, Director, iPhone, Android and plain (X)HTML/javascript for agencies, syndication, gaming networks, promotions and custom ip.  We contract and subcontract for game development, game design, network architecture and strategic marketing of your gaming product or brand you want to expose via an online game on a website, social network, mobile device or desktop download.