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!
September 9, 2009
We’ve been hard at work since our last post to the PushButton Engine blog, and it’s time to talk about what’s new once again!
First off, we’ve posted several short videos with high level explanations of how PushButton Engine works. If you’ve read the code but still aren’t clear on the big picture and have 5 minutes to spare, these might help. There are three so far:
We’re working on more, so visit our forums and let us know what to cover next!
Have you ever wanted to listen to people talk about the PushButton Engine for extended periods of time? Well, your dreams just came true! Joseph Burchett from Game Developer’s Radio interviewed Ben Garney, lead developer of PushButton Engine, and asked him a bunch of interesting questions about PBE and Flash games. Give it a listen!
Finally, if you haven’t been keeping up with our SVN repository, you might want to start. Since our last release, we’ve had 269 commits from a dozen community members! We’re working on getting ready for another release, but the code in SVN is ready for the adventurous to use now. Docs are in progress for the next release; we have five new lessons. Three are on getting started with Flash CS4, FlashDevelop, and Flex Builder. The remaining two are on working with keyboard input and using and embedding images. They’re only going to work with the latest code from SVN, but when the new release is out, they’ll be on the official docs page and ready to go.
Thanks for reading!
July 2, 2009
I just wanted to quickly point out some cool stuff from the PushButton Engine forums since we’ve been in beta.
Cool Projects:
Mine Enemy by Clint Herron
S’troidz! (Week 1 Update) by Phil Perron
Rolly Ball Game by Ben Garney
Yet Another Tetris Clone by Doki
Great Threads & Resources:
HanClintoLib v0.3 by Clint Herron
Ant Build Files by Ian P.
Embedding Fonts in Flex by Ben Garney
New Beginner PBE Lessons by Clint Herron
Getting Started Guide for Flash CS4 by Ben Garney (in Japanese by Hiroki)
Improved 2D Sprite Rendering by Lithander
Componetizing Flint Particles for PBE by Faust
Awesome forum threads!
Lastly, in case you haven’t been around for awhile or missed it, there has been some awesome new “getting started” style tutorials put into the Docs area submitted by great community members.
New Tutorials:
Flex Builder Setup Tutorial by Jeremy Easoz
FlashDevelop Setup Tutorial by Jeremy Easoz
Lesson #2 Adding a Simple Shape by Clint Herron
Lesson #3 Adding Control with a Custom Component by Clint Herron
Keep on rocking guys!
April 16, 2009
Download the PushButton Engine SDK Revision 65!
We got a lot of great feedback from you community members, and addressed as much as we could in this update as well as the usual round of bugfixes and enhancements. Here’s just a few of the changes that made it in to this release:
- Added a bunch of new content to the manual and refreshed the API reference.
- It’s now even easier to use PushButton Engine for experienced developers: just grab the SWCs out of the Library folder and go.
- We added a slick demo game that shows how to implement sound effects, custom physics, scorekeeping, custom preloader, multiple levels, pausing and more - visit the RollyBall Game Showoff Thread to play it.
- Supports pure ActionScript or Flex projects.
- Project Manager renamed to Engine Manager and significantly updated. No longer have to use Engine Manager for common scenarios.
- Many improvements to Rendering2D and other parts of the engine.
Many thanks to everyone who helped with this release! There is a release thread in the forums if you would like to post your feedback/comments/congratulations.
Now go and make something cool!
April 1, 2009
If you were tracking the @pushbuttonlabs Twitter feed, then you know that we just recently got back from the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference. Busy week! Both were great shows, and it was fantastic to meet up with other Flash game developers.
Of course, we’ve been building games for years, so we said hi to our more traditional game development brethren, too. 
It’s very interesting looking at the Flash space - in a year, there will be a lot more “old school” game developers doing Flash. The crowd at Flash Gaming Summit was young (and passionate) compared to the game dev scene as a whole. It’s going to be a lot of fun watching Flash grow up.
At the Game Developer’s Conference, it was amazing how seriously people took what we’re doing in the Labs. I was expecting people to kind of blow us off - “who needs a Flash game engine?” But nearly everyone we talked to was very interested in our technology and business model. Jeff Tunnell wrote a great introduction to our vision for the engine. We even got tracked down by James Au of GigaOM - read his coverage of the PushButton Engine.
What about the engine? Well, we found a few bugs since the last release, and we learned an important fact at the Flash Gaming Summit - that a lot of developers still use pure ActionScript and the Flash IDE. Version 36 of PushButton Engine is out - you can read the release announcement on our forums, but the main highlights are: support for pure AS3 development (for instance from the Flash IDE), SWCs are included for easier integration with Flash/FlashDevelop, and a ton of usability bugs from the last update have been fixed.
Go check out the engine!
Image by Blakespot
March 20, 2009
Every game stands on the shoulders of giants. Every game is based on technology and ideas that have come before. Our component store brings the convenience of the iPhone App Store to the world of game development.
Need a physics library? Grab one from the store, drop it into your game, and start making it fun. Need a particle system? Grab some particle components and get started right away. Sound effects or art? Get it and go.
Some components will be free, and others will be pay. Some will be developed by PushButton Labs, but the majority will be from developers just like you. The store is open to everyone - upload your components and start selling them right away. The store will be integrated into our editor as well as available on our website, so using it will be quick and convenient.
March 12, 2009
Grunts Skirmish has been in development at PushButton Labs along side the engine to keep us honest. There is no better way to test your tech than to “eat you own dog food”. Hope you enjoy the in-development snapshot and see you on the battlefield when we open it for beta.
Grunts Skirmish development snapshot