This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote Packaging Flex games for Ubuntu, on the subject of Flash, Flex, Ubuntu, and Quickly.

After yesterday's experimentation with Adobe Flex to build open source games on Ubuntu, I thought: obviously the next step is to make it really easy to package those games up. This is what Quickly is for, and Quickly is capable of having "templates": ways of setting up new types of projects.

So, after a little bit of hacking, and some help from Didier Roche, I can now do this:

aquarius@giles: $ wget http://adamatomic.com/mode/Mode.swf
--2011-01-03 17:38:54--  http://adamatomic.com/mode/Mode.swf
Saving to: `Mode.swf'
2011-01-03 17:38:56 (201 KB/s) - `Mode.swf' saved [350603/350603]

aquarius@giles: $ quickly create flash-game mode-by-adamatomic Mode.swf 
Creating project directory mode-by-adamatomic
Creating bzr repository and commiting
Launching your newly created project!
Congratulations, your new project is set up! cd /home/aquarius/mode-by-adamatomic/ to edit the details.
aquarius@giles: $ cd mode-by-adamatomic/
aquarius@giles: $ quickly package
.......Ubuntu packaging created in debian/
........................................
Ubuntu package has been successfully created in ../mode-by-adamatomic_0.1_all.deb

Hooray; package up a Flash game and make it available to Ubuntu users in two commands. Quickly really is great.

jorge

Nice!

Now make it so authors can automagically have that submitted to USC and get paid. :)

Andreas Nilsson

Sweet!

Didn't know how to get it to run, so I was unable to do Canabalt [1]

A desktop-file as well would be neat, now I had to run Mode from the terminal.

1. http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/

sil

Andreas: to run, "quickly run" in the folder. (Note: Canabalt is not open source, so redistributing it is a no-no!) A desktop file is a good idea; I don't really know how to do that, though. Hm, will think about it...

sil

Andreas: now fixed. Thanks for that!

Andreas Nilsson

Ah, great!

I just wanted to try Canabalt it as an example for myself.

Will see if I can get this to run now.

ethana2

This seems like it has the potential to be very fun, but the .deb doesn't put it in the right menu category (games), and I can't figure out why the guy keeps dying..

Jono Bacon

Great work, pal!

As for the .desktop file, I am assuming you could just take some of the data from the project's setup.py and use that to generate a .desktop file? Sounds like it should be fairly straightforward.

Rock and roll. :-)

sil

Jono: yep, the .desktop files stuff is now fixed. ethana2: that's just because I'm lame at building packages; that's my fault, not Quickly's :)

Scott Ritchie

Rick Spencer and I were talking about this exact idea at UDS, and I believe he was even experimenting with a prototype there that he didn't get working. Have you shown this to him yet?

Paul

Thanks for this! I just wasted a bunch of time going through quickly tutorials :) Awesome stuff!

Also, I read "adamatomic" and thought it was going to be BSG: Adama-tomic. lulz.

plaes

A little nitpick: s/Linux/\.deb\ using\ distributions/g ;)

Not all Linux'es use .deb packages.

sil

Scott: yes, I have. I was standing behind Rick when he wrote that prototype ;)

plaes: no-one has mentioned "Linux" on this page other than you. I talked about Ubuntu.

Marlon

Awesome! Can't wait to try this out when I get home :)

Cheers

Douglas

Great! But how can i uninstall the game?

sil

Douglas: search for "adamatomic" in Software Centre and it should find the game and let you remove it.

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.