Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Adobe Air – Why no low / medium StageQuality?

4T2 have just completed our first game to be distributed via Adobe Air. Flash based Games on your Desktop and Start menu– great!

However, I’ve got to question Adobe’s logic in not supporting low and medium StageQuality in Air. We nearly always make our Flash games in low StageQuality mode (no anti-aliasing) so they run faster. So why would Air not support this? If they want people to develop games for this platform it is a crazy choice.

I’d like to publish every game we ever make in Air so that at the end of the online game you can click on a button to add it to your desktop. This would be an amazing feature as it would definitely increase the number of times our games are played as they pop on and off various homepages. We could also then add some further features to encourage this behaviour. It should be easy…

What is even more annoying is the fact Adobe don’t exactly come forward and announce this fact. The key information can be found on this page. Note the reference to Air 1.0 and then ‘not supported’ later on. Thanks for that!

If anyone from Adobe is reading this, can you put this near the top of your ‘to fix’ list please. It would help us massively. And if anyone knows how to get around this I’d be very grateful.

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Encouraging game completion

4T2 have just finished our latest project for LEGO City – Build It

The interactive puzzle game is targeted towards six year olds so is relatively simple to play, yet highly addictive due to a collecting element.

The major difference between this campaign and our other LEGO projects is the integration between the game and My LEGO Network. I’d recommend anyone have a good long look at MLN as it is awesome.

After completing a set of vehicles in the game the user can collect a special MLN reward.


The reward is sent to the players MLN ‘email’ account by a special character you can go on to make friends with.


The virtual friend, Jack Drill, gives you a blueprint for a trophy to display on your personal homepage – leading your friends to ask – “How did you get that?”.


This integration encourages people to sign up for a LEGO Account and takes players from one LEGO promotion to another. It helps to completely immerse a child in the world of LEGO and allows us to strengthen the plot of the game. More importantly, it encourages the child to complete the ‘Build It’ game in full, experiencing all that has to offer.

Look out for more such activates in our next LEGO campaign…

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