August 13, 2010
It’s that time of year again - Adobe MAX 2010 time!
If you’ll be at Adobe’s premiere conference, consider attending this year’s PushButton Engine session. Last year we previewed HanClinto’s Platformer Starter Kit in a 3 hour lab to over a hundred attendees. This year, we have scaled back a tiny bit - PBE maintainer Ben Garney will be giving an hour lecture on the PushButton Engine, covering its design, how to use it, and how it can save you time and effort on your next game project. We hope to see you there!
August 7, 2010
Ready for your next fix of sweet PushButton Engine podcast content?
Add RIARadio episode #17: Nate Beck, Ben Garney, and PBE to your playlist. It’s a good time.
It’s only due to the kindness of Garth Braithwaite, Leif Wells, and Zach Stepek that we were featured on another awesome, Flash-oriented podcast! Thanks for having us, guys!
Additionally, if you will be attending GDC Online (formerly GDC Austin), you should definitely attend Building Social Flash Games With An Open Source Engine: PushButton Engine 101 with PBE maintainer Ben Garney. The session summary probably puts it best:
The PushButton Engine is an open source Flash game development framework. In March of 2010, it powered approximately 60 million player experiences. PBE is being used by companies including Playdom, Disney, Zynga, Hive7, Three Rings, and RockYou. Ben introduces the fundamental concepts of the engine, and gives you everything you need to know to build your next Flash game fast, better, and stronger.
Attendees will be introduced to a powerful free framework for building Flash/social games.
Be sure to say hi if you’re in Austin this October 5-8!
August 2, 2010
Do you like hearing other people talk about PushButton Engine?
If so, take an hour and treat yourself to episode #115 of the Flex Show, featuring PBE maintainer Ben Garney and PBE contributor (and all around good guy) Nate Beck. Big thanks to Jeffrey and John for featuring PBE!
Even better, if you’ll be in the Washington, DC area for 360|Flex in late September, you can catch not one, not two, but three awesome sessions involving PBE.
They are:
- PushButton Engine 101 with Ben Garney
Sunday, Sep 19, 2010 - 1:30pm to 5pm
Ben will take you from newbie to expert. Get a full walkthrough of the PushButton Engine and what it can do for you, followed by a PBE workshop and Q&A session. Learn everything - and we mean everything - you ever wanted to know about working with PushButton Engine at this extra-long session!
- Know Thy Enemy, The Art of Hacking Flash Games with Nate Beck
Monday, Sep 20, 2010 - 1:30pm to 2:40pm
Nate Beck will go into detail on the ins and outs of hacking Flash games. Learn how to make your game hack-proof - and how to get a high score on your favorite game without even playing it. 
- Building Tools for the Pushbutton Engine - Flex Gangsta Style with Jeremy Saenz
Monday, Sep 20, 2010 - 2:50pm to 4:00pm
Flex Gangsta Jeremy Saenz talks about building tools for the PushButton Engine with Mate. Learn about developing complex editor applications as well as how PBE can be fully data driven. Don’t miss this one - rumor is there will be a cool surprise announcement.
We hope to see you there!
July 1, 2010
Social City, the PushButton Engine based game that PushButton Labs also worked on, was named the #2 Top Facebook game for 2010 by InsideFaceBook!
Check out the full story at: the PushButton Labs homepage.
June 1, 2010
Hey all,
We have open sourced one of our internal tools, the PushButton Labs Profiler. It is a hierarchical sampling profiler designed to help you tune the performance of your Flash content. It’s also a useful learning tool - it can give you profiling information on any SWF you open, not just your own content.
If you have struggled to get useful results from the Flash Builder profiler, you should give this tool a try. It’s barer bones, but it often works in situations where Flash Builder doesn’t, and it does not obscure any data, giving you a full performance picture of your application. The profiler is targeted for advanced users.
We’ve opened a section on our forums for discussion about the profiler. In addition, source and binaries can be downloaded from the PBLabs Profiler project on GitHub. The profiler is available under the GPL v3.
We hope it is useful for you!
April 5, 2010
PushButton Labs is proud to announce the release of PushButton Engine 1.0!
Looking back on PBE’s Ohloh info, you’ll see that PushButton Engine arrived to the open source world at March 2009 at a healthy 35,000 lines, having undergone 1093 revisions in our internal repository. Between March 2009 and March 2010, PBL employees and our active community contributed over 900 revisions and an additional 30,000 lines of code and docs to the core codebase!
Ohloh now ranks us in the top 10% of active open source projects. 14 talented developers have publicly contributed to the engine in the last year, not counting private and anonymous contributions. Our site has served 17,000 downloads of the engine across 11 releases including version 1.0, not counting SVN checkouts.
In the same timeframe, our forums gained 4200 posts and enlisted 1103 users. Several major Facebook games using PushButton Engine shipped, including ZooWorld from RockYou, Social City from Playdom, and YouTopia from hive7. There are also some good games in our Show Off forums and our Developer Gallery - more than we can list here.
Now that 1.0 is out, we hope that you will take a few moments to read the Official PushButton Engine Documentation and download PushButton Engine 1.0. For the truly impatient, we even have a PBE in 30 Seconds guide.
Finally, thank you to everyone who has supported PushButton Engine through the long beta cycle, both by using it and by contributing to it. It’s come a long way in the last year, and we are excited to see how it grows in the next.
February 20, 2010
PushButton Labs will be attending Game Developers Conference once again this year down at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Jeff Tunnell, Tim Aste, and Ben Garney will all be attending the conference and in addition you will be able to find us at the Flash Gaming Summit on Monday (March 8th). Be sure to check out Ben as he presents PushButton Engine 101 at the Flash Gaming Summit.
We are currently scheduling meetings for individuals, studios or publishers who would like to meet up with us to talk about anything PushButton related! We cover a lot of areas such as PushButton Engine Licensing, Game Development, Social Gaming, Flash Gaming, as well as our various game properties (The Incredible Machine, Grunts, The Great Games Experiment). PushButton will only be in town through the morning of Thursday the 11th and our schedule is filling up fast! If you would like to schedule a time to sit down with any of the PBL guys in person feel free to drop us a line at tima@pushbuttonlabs.com. See you at the show!
February 12, 2010
PushButton Engine @ Flash Gaming Summit
Are you attending
Mochi Medias Flash Gaming Summit 2010 in San Francisco this year? If so, be sure to catch Ben Garney’s
PushButton Engine 101 session. The session description:
PushButton Engine is an open source game framework for Flash. It is used in several social games, among them hive7’s YouTopia, Zynga’s Fishville, and an upcoming Playdom title. Learn about its design, strengths and weaknesses, and how it can save you time and effort on your next project.
Flash Gaming Summit is being held on March 8th, 2010 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. You can find more information about the event (as well as register) at the Flash Gaming Summit website. Hope to see you there!
December 8, 2009
PushButton Labs attended the 2009 Flash Game Summit (put on by Mochi Media) and we must be making an impression around the Flash Community as Ben will be serving on the 2010 advisory board! Mochi Media will once again be putting on the one day conference in March right before the traditional Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Early Bird Registration is once again open at $99.00 a ticket. You can read the full press release announcing the second installment of the FGS by clicking read more.
Read the rest of this entry »
October 4, 2009
Are you going to be at Adobe MAX 2009? If so, read the next few paragraphs. If not, skip down to the r470 release announcement below. 
PushButton Labs’ Ben Garney will be running a BYOL session Wed, Oct. 7, at 4pm on “Building a Flash Based Platformer in 90 Minutes.” You will get some hands on time with the PushButton Engine, a preview copy of the Platformer Starter Kit, and end up building a platformer that looks a lot like this:
(Click image to play demo)
If you’re going to be at MAX and want to talk Flash games, post in our forums, e-mail us at engine at pushbuttonlabs dot com, or DM us at @pushbuttonlabs.
In other news, PushButton Engine revision 470 is out! This release is a big step forward from r189 - it will feel like a whole new engine. A few of the bigger changes include:
- Vastly simplified installation process. No more Engine Manager - just add the contents of src/ to your project!
- Improved documentation - including getting started guides for Flash CS4, Flex/Flash Builder, and FlashDevelop, as well as videos introducing parts of the engine.
- Conformed to the Adobe Flex Code Style Guide - code is more intuitive and easier to work with.
You can read more about r470 in its release thread on the forums, or you can download r470 today!