As you may know from this blog, I recently wrote a few paragraphs about progress of the project. And there is even MumboJumboT’s Twitter stream with more detailed tweets. But — believe me, it’s hard to tell — now I am not very happy with the results and I have to confess I failed on several places.

First, as usual, I was way too optimistic. I thought I’d be able to code more and harder, but it was not really possible for several reasons. Just a few hours before I started the project I had finished another long term job and hence I was somewhat tired. Our kids were sick two days as well and on the end I was lazy too :) As you may know I planned to create a blabbing machine. And… Failed. Sorry about that, next time I’ll think twice before I start a project like this one.

But! I think even with my failures I’ve got something for you. The MumboJumboT project lite. Very lite. If you’re interested, I’d be glad to show you my humble Adobe AIR application, which you can install by clicking the badge here.

So what is it all about?

This is just an eye candy and mainly a tutorial AIR app. You can click links below to read more on how the project was done and meanwhile you can play with it.

MumboJumboT allows you to:

• Load a sample song (thanks to Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac for The Sphere song from his Organic album, the other song done by me),

• Load your very own Ogg Vorbis file (info on Xiph.org as well),

• Play an Ogg file — actually it was not possible before, because Flash knows just MP3s. If you don’t want to get into dirty details on the Wiki page, you just need to know Ogg provides much higher quality on lower bitrates. The playback is done by Branden Hall‘s Ogg Vorbis Alchemy port, heavily altered by me for purposes of this app,

• Somewhat visualize the playback.

That’s pretty much for now, so let’s continue on the code stuff.

MumboJumboT code

You can read everything about the project’s code on the documentation page of the MumboJumboT project. Please don’t forget to visit its GitHub repository.

What you will learn:

PureMVC and Startup Manager

PureMVC is a cool Model-View-Controller framework aimed to help you to create cleaner code in several languages. And its Startup Manager is a good way how to put initialization of your application in a queue, while following each Proxy requirements.

• Application facade (Documentation and code)
• Application mediator (Documentation and code)
• Loading and queue of proxies (Documentation and code)

Config files

Here you can see my Proxy helping to easily parse config XML settings. The online flavour allows you to merge parsed settings with FlashVars. You can localize the app from the config XML as well, you know, it’s not a good thing to have any static text in the SWF (it obviously doesn’t apply to the logging output).

• Config proxy (Documentation and code)

AIR Updates

Adobe AIR platform allows applications to self-update when there’s a new version available. See the code below to see how to do that:

• Checking for updates (Documentation and code)

Away3D

Away3D is a well known 3D library. And its new Lite flavour finally provides hardware acceleration via Flash 10 postcards in space acceleration features.

• Spinbox (Documentation and code)
• Spinbox Mediator (Documentation and code)

OGG Decoding

As I wrote above, thanks to Branden Hall I was able to use Ogg Vorbis files in the app, even it was not possible before.

• Ogg Vorbis Decoder (code)
• Sample Proxy (Documentation and code)

Advanced mouse controls

You can see there’s a somewhat sick mouse handler allowing you to drag-and-rotate so called Spinbox.

• Mouse Proxy (Documentation and code)

Skinning

Here you can see how to skin the app with my vancura-as3-libs library. Download the skin folder here.

• About Panel (code)
• Load Panel (code)
• Play Panel (coe)

Mocking up

Just to revisit what was written in previous articles, here’s an archive of PSD files you can download. Just in case you’d be interested on how the GUI part was done.

You can watch a screencast of the mocking up on Vimeo.

Legal stuff

Licensed under Attribution-Share Alike (CC) license. OGG Alchemy Decoder by Branden Hall and Xiph.org Foundation. More info RaveIN font by Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac.

Unfortunately on the first day I was not really working as hard as I would need. Mainly because I finished a large project yesterday morning and I was not so fresh. I need to concentrate more during next few days, so I won’t be a promising looser.

But there were few things I’ve successfully done. First, I made a Twitter account. Pretty sweet, huh :]

Then there was the logotype. The application is based on a concept of a robot blabbing nonsense. Because I’ll use Away3D library, everything will be somewhat raw – boxes and angles everywhere. That should be OK for a robot, except Eva from Wall-E nearly all robots are made of boxes.

Logo

I was not entirely happy with boxy look, so I needed to make it softer somehow. Hence I added the key to the right side. My robot, MumboJumboT, will have a similar key, hopefully rotating while playing.

Twitter

Then I needed to come up with a Twitter background and of course an avatar. Here’s a screenshot of current state of MumboJumboT’s Twitter home:

Click the image to see the full resolution.

As promised, here you can have PSDs I created.

Source code

Yesterday I was also happy to prepare a functional AIR source base I can use now. It’s deployed to the GitHub repo I’ve prepared for the project.

So now it’s the second day and I need to continue. Today I want to prepare all graphics assets I will need. Watch the MumboJumboT’s Twitter stream at @mumbojumbot for more information about the progress.

Update

MumboJumboT project is done. Read more here.

We thought isometric view would be awesome for a game of this type. My part of this job was to bring to life the whole client side, except drawings (done by Vladimír ‘Frognfly’ Chalupa) – that means all user interface graphics, icons, animations, Flash, Papervision3D and interactivity is my work.

I really enjoyed this job as I was able to do what I love, from scratch to finish. While designing skinning core, I developed a new skinning library I will open for public use soon. Watch my space on GitHub.

Click the images below to view
full resolution screenshots.

Initial game screen. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Basic screen elements. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

First game mockups. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Overall map with an already bought house and current avatar position. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Original overall map. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Original character designer screen, page 1. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Original character designer screen, page 2. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Defect window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Jackpot window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Casino window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Help a Friend window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Job window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

New Message window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Taxi window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Jail window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Webcafe window. Click the image to see the full resolution screenshot.

Animated preloader preview

Click to see the preloader preview.

But unfortunately it was never launched.

Click the images below to view
full resolution screenshots.

Post Job Listing. Click the image to see the full resolution.

Pure text document. Click the image to see the full resolution.

Job Listing. Click the image to see the full resolution.