The Ryndem Sound Engine

Wow, it's been a while now since I've updated my blog.  With so much going on, who has time to write?

With all the game stuff I've been doing lately in my free time, I've been finding an incredible lack of good Audio tools for Game Devs.  The only one I found that was worth a damn was  Fmod, which is amazingly powerful, but also very expensive to license for the Casual game peeps.

So, I decided to make my own Unity3d/Flash Sound Engine and it's called Ryndem.  I also took a little bit of a different approach.  While it's a sound mixing program like Fmod is, it also is a smart system that you can use to drive the gameplay itself.

It will also have a super simple Hierarchical State Machine incorporated into it, so you can map out the mix/gameplay elements.  This will be useful for Rhythm games, and just keeping everything in a beautiful sync.  I'm still working on the UI, but I have a few in game music mixes here:

www.soundcloud.com/Ryndem

And you can follow the project at:  www.twitter.com/Ryndem

Flashhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I've been noticing that a lot of the main flash dudes are talking about things that are very un-flash lately. Such as: Unity3d (which I'm a super fanboy of already), Cocoa/ObjC/iPhone Development (I'm wondering if that market isn't already oversaturated), Facebook Development (really now?), Silverlight (it's actually really powerful, and once they unleash it's 3d power. . . flash had best watch it's back), and just generally telling all the Flash/Flex Developers to learn some new languages.

Was there a memo I missed? If you were to follow all of the flasherati's blogs and forecast where all of this is leading, you would start to wonder about Flash's future. Pixel Bender was touted as the Flash savior, but it's still too young yet (and not to mention how Flash seems to break Pixel Bender's knees somehow only allowing it to gimp along). Flash's 3d support is sad. Although the amazing teams working on Away and Papervision have pushed Flash into new territory, it's still kinda sad the poly count that flash can deal with (especially comparing to Unity3d's output).

Long story short. . . Flash is going to remain king of RIA for a while, but I think the lack of Flash support on the iPhone has really hurt it. The flash bubble has been popped. Now what?