There's no avoiding those Angry Birds. They are, quite literally, everywhere: toys, snacks, cartoons, plush toys and that wildly addictive crippled that seemingly everyone has downloaded at some point — 1 billion of us last year alone.
2012 was different landmark year astatine the Angry Birds aviary, otherwise known as Rovio. The Finnish-based developer not only free a slew of tie-ins — from Green Day to Star Wars — but as well went social.
Not only did releasing Angry Birds on Facebook require the game's engine to be rewritten in the all-new Flash 11, simply the power of Facebook's platform intended that the game's mechanics could glucinium tweaked further to take advantage of the common graph.
Halogen the forefront of this project was Ville Koskela, a metal game programmer at Rovio. Ville has been a developer for his entire grown life, with a background in C++ and ActionScript. And when he's not working on 1 of the biggest games in the world for the biggest social network in the global, he loves running in and around his home town of Espoo, Finland (he ran a 100-km race in under 12 work time).
Ville sported a playoff hair during the last few weeks of the hang over.
I chatted with Ville astir bringing Angry Birds to Facebook, and started by asking however he got the job.
"I worked as a software creator at Sulake, the company behind the teenage online chat world Habbo Building. At Sulake, I had been one of the two guys leading the conversion of Habbo Hotel from Shockwave to the Flash version. I had naturally read about the glory of Ireful Birds and curbed Rovio's website at some point, but posterior then there was no Web team yet, and even though I had done mobile programming myself, I wasn't too interested within that anymore.
Then, during the summer of 2011, I was contacted through LinkedIn and asked if I was interested in coming within for AN interview at Rovio. After hearing what the new job would metal about, the decision to join Rovio was a really easy one."
What exactly does his role entail?
"As a lead game programmer, I am a supervisor for a team of ten other Flash and C++ programmers, varying from trainees to seniors. I go done job applications, achieve interviews, and try to act each the projects hold right harden of programmer resources available to launch on schedule — and that they meet our quality expectations. I also still do some (mostly motor) ActionScript programming myself, but mainly try to concentrate on helping others do their programming job the highest way possible.
I work closely beside the graphic designers, server programmers and producers — basically most of the different people involved in the development of every Angry Fowl game."
So, what's it similar working at Rovio?
"The working environment is really good, and the atmosphere is relaxed. We try to combine the good parts of traditional planning in advance with agile methods to achieve the best possible results. Last merely not least, working on something element hot as the Angry Birds brand ensures that each one is giving their best in the opposite projects."
Angry Ducks started go on the iPhone within Dec 2009 and has arguably become the largest mobile franchise on the planet. With success came expansions, spin-offs and ports, and in 2010 Rovio started working on a Facebook version.
In March 2011, InsideMobileApps interviewed Peter Vesterback (@pvesterbacka), Chief Marketing Man and "Mighty Eagle" at Rovio, and asked him why development was taking so long.
"You can't bear associate experience that works in one environment and one ecosystem and force-feed it onto another. It's like Zynga. They can't only take FarmVille and throw it on mobile and see what sticks. The titles that have been successful all for them next to mobile are the ones they've built from the ground up for the platform."
The original unlock date for Angry Birds on Facebook, nowadays set as Angry Birds Friends, was May 2011. It wasn't until ulterior that yr that Ville joined Rovio, and the port still wasn't finished.
"When I joined the company at the beginning of September 2011, there was a Glint 10 example of the original Angry Birds game available that had been done faster within 2011.
The prototype's performance wasn't too good, which was the reason to wait for Flash 11, with the support of GPU-accelerated Stage 3D graphics. Before continuing the development, I was hired both to lead the new team of Flash developers joining the people and to product sure a fully optimized Flash 11 version of the game was ready for release as soon as possible."
Flash? Yes, Flash. For those of U.S. who mortal avoided Adobe's waning flagship for the last few months or eld, it turns out that it has gotten considerably better. So, Twinkle 11 is Adobe's attempt to reinvigorate the stand with cutting-edge 2-D and 3-D rendition.
The Stage 3D that Ville mentions is Adobe's very low GPU-accelerated APIs. You can hack them directly using the AGAL language or, As Rovio has through, activity a framework and ActionScript. For 2-D applications with 3-D acceleration, the open-source Starling Carcass is the choice of many. But as Rovio was developing Angry Birds for Facebook, the framework still hadn't been completed.
"We started the development with an unreleased version of the Starling Framework. Back past, Starling's performance was not overly good, so I did mountain of optimizations there myself, about which I as well wrote on my journal. Now these optimizations (and also many others) have found their route into the topical version of the Starling Framework, so other developers don't have to go through this process themselves anymore.
It in a bit became clear that we could achieve the desired performance with GPU rendition, but machines next to only CPU rendering weren't doing too well. To get the game running smoothly on those machines meant we had to cut fuzz some graphic detail — heavy rendering quality and dropping one layers and animations from the background graphics."
Flash 11 and Part 3D have excited many people, and they represent a lifeline for a product that seemed to be drowning, not waving. I asked Ville what he thought this meant for the future of the stand.
"In my opinion, with the release of Flash 11, Adobe has proven that it really wants to provide millions of developers near tools with which you can bring A-quality games to Web. Stage 3D graphics might not be a k times faster close to some advertisements read, but they are still a lot faster, enabling 60-FPS full-screen gameplay for our 2-D Livid Birds and really high frame tax for some 3-D games out there. The release of Flash 11 has also made the "Flash is dead" chanters beautiful hush this year."
Or has it? Many proponents of HTML5-based apps are quick to dismiss Flash. And a certain Steve Jobs announced the end of support for it totally next to iOS in a well-publicized clear letter back within 2010.
Indeed, Google is dropping support for Flash next to Golem, and an HTML5 variation of Angry Birds is available in the Chrome Web Reservoir. Even Microsoft is getting in on the act, teaming up with ZeptoLab to create an HTML5 version of Wound the Rope to show off the current version of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft used an HTML5 version of Separate the Rope to demo its latest browser.
Next to all of the trash talk nearly HTML5 versus Flash, does Ville think scrutiny the two is even fair?
"Here at Rovio, we do not have "this technology" versus "that technology" thinking. If a recent stage has the abilities and a big adequate audience, there's a good chance that you shall see Angry Birds there. I believe that all the technologies have their strengths, and once there's competition, each participant faculty gain from that and become better within the long run."
As Peter Vesterback mentions in his interview with InsideMobileApps, a successful game needs to beryllium improved from the ground up for each platform. This presented an opportunity for Rovio to squeeze the tried-and-trusted Wrothful Fowl formula all for a social surroundings.
I asked Ville only how far they pushed the envelope.
"Bringing the halt to Facebook naturally added the social feature. We tried to think of how players would like to either compete against or promotion their friends. Our game designer spent juncture playing other successful Facebook games and thinking about what ideas would work in Angry Birds and what wouldn't. We came up with the crown concept; the three best players in your friends network would have crowns — gold, silver and bronze — for every of the levels, so that there is continual competition to be the best artist on each solitary level.
The biggest change we introduced to the very game was the power-ups, with which the players can undertake even higher scores on the levels. The power-ups give a way to monetize the game since they are available element an in-application purchase; but they too aid with retention since players who keep returning to the game get aweigh power-ups, and it's also would-be to gift your friends next to those."
Those two magic words, "social" and "monetize." This is perhaps one of the prime draws of Facebook for Rovio. And near over 23 million likes already, it is clearly delivering on the swear that the Angry Birds brand makes.
But near so many platforms, so several crossovers and licensing opportunities, what is presently driving development for the team? Is it new halting features? Or is it new content, close to the recent link near Green Day? Meet how far can these birds dart?
"The guys making decisions [about licensing opportunities] go through the pros and cons within each individual case both before and after the project. All of the Irate Birds fans out in that should be pretty upbeat that the brand will stay strong, and modern and interesting matters will preserve upcoming at a steady pace."
As the Angry Birds empire continues to grow — and it sure shows no signs of stopping — people such as Ville are the ones abidance the brand and experience consistent across all of the platforms that we now use.
We can only hope that the continued development of newfound angles and spin-offs — like Bad Piggies — dont dilute the experience that many of U.S.A. fell crazy with. There can be too much of a good article, after every.
For games developers and designers, Mad Birds Friends also reminds us that Flash still has a prominent place in the market. By finally harnessing the power of the GPU, Adobe has yawning up the floodgates to 3-D games that look and play fair like their PC and console equivalents. The big examine is whether it's overly little, too slowly.
Ultimately, the power now lies with Android and iOS, because the desktop market — and, thus, the market for Twinkle apps — is shrinking. But by shell all of its bases, Rovio has made sure that Angry Birds will be winged in and out of our lives for years coming up .
Resources
Angry Birds on Facebook Ville Koskela "Rovio Has Been Working connected the Facebook Version of Angry Birds all for a Year," Kim-Mai Cutler, InsideMobileApps The Oscine Framework Stage 3D for Flash RovioCredits of image connected front page: thethreesisters.
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© Richard Shepherd for Not bad Mag, 2013.
Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/02/22/bringing-angry-birds-facebook/
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