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Quick Tip: Embeding european special characters…

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 | Actionscript 2, Actionscript 3, Quick Tip | No Comments

To save you embeding characters you don’t need and wasting file size on a project that might use european characters, heres a list of characters you can just manually include.

This covers French, German, Italian,  Portugese, and Spanish.

ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÑÒÓÔÕÖÙÚÛßàáâã äåæçèéêëìíîïñòóôõöùúûüŒœ¿

Tags: Embeding Characters, font

Replace Mochiads with Affiliate Ads – More Cash for the Creative

Friday, December 5th, 2008 | Actionscript 3, Affiliate Marketing | No Comments

I like Mochiads, it’s a great way for flash game developers to earn cash for their games, along with using the Mochibot tracking platform to track their games usage around the web.

But in the revenue stream, there’s a lot of people taking a slice of the action for every user you get to watch or click on an ad. Now for CPM – cost per thousand, where all the advertiser is after is eyeballs then you haven’t got a lot of choice. That usually pays $0.30-$0.45 per thousand people who play your game.

CPC – Cost per Click is usually slightly more, but you are usually prevented from custom styling these ads to attract more clicks, or decide on what ads would suit your game/app.

A way to make the big money is the CPA model – Cost per Acquisition, you get a user to click an ad, open the merchants page, then make a purchase. Usually a cookie will be placed on the users machine so if they return to the merchant again within say 30days and make the purchase you will still be credited.

CPA makes on average anywhere between 5-15% of the value of the item.  $100 Dollar item means 5-15 dollars for you. Much more than CPM model, but much more risky. You’ve got to manage it yourself, and if the customer returns the item, you don’t get paid.

I look on it as a huge chance for any creative flashers to make a lot of money by doing it themselves.

Say you’ve made a Golf Flash game like this one from Elecrotank, you could show ads for golfing products over your game, even use the name and image of the product as equipment in your game!

Here i’ve signed up to Commission Junction, made a php file from their example to proxy the request for products. This is needed to protect your developer key – how you get paid. And parsed those products into standard vanilla style Google Ads. Imagine using the data for these products as resources in your game. Unlock new equipment for your character in game which are real life products with images, name description and links to buy.

There are loads of Affiliate networks out there, all have different speeds of their API’s, different merchants, and different levels of support. I’ve picked Commission Junction here as they are big in the states, and they happened to have loads of golf merchants. They are however slow, and not that easy to start with. The source should help  with that. If speed is a real issue you could store a load of products in your own database and serve them from there.

So pick a merchant, sign up, join some merchants, and start using their API’s to get some products. The source code includes everything you need to get started with Commission Junction and Affiliate Window, and is easily extended to parse data from other Affiliate Networks.

I’ve worked with most of the Affiliate networks, so if you need a hand finding out which one is good for you get in touch or check out the Affiliates4u.com forums.

List of some of the Affiliates out there -

Commission Junction – http://www.commissionjunction.com

Affiliate Window – http://www.affiliatewindow.com

Affiliate Future – http://www.affiliatefuture.co.uk/

Buy.at – http://www.http://buy.at/

Cleverat – http://www.cleverat.com/

DGM Affiliates – http://www.dgmaffiliates.com/

Linkshare – http://www.linkshare.com/

NetKlix – http://www.netklix.com/us/

OMGUK – http://www.omguk.com/

Paid on Results – http://www.paidonresults.com/

Premier Affiliate Network – http://www.premieraffiliates.com/

Slivertap – http://www.silvertap.com/

Trade Doubler – http://www.tradedoubler.com/pan/cms/

Trade Tracker – http://www.tradetracker.net/gb/index/index

Webgains – http://www.webgains.com/index.html

Zanox – http://www.zanox.com/us/

Adobe Kuler API Key

Monday, December 1st, 2008 | Actionscript 3 | No Comments

I’ve finally gotten round to updating the previous quick and dirty example of how you could use the Kuler API to very quickly let your users skin your application, inconjunction with some greyscale tonal transitions to give it an Aqua look.

The changes Adobe made which broke the original version were to force the use of a Developer key, much like google maps, which must be included in all service requests. I’m not going to bother removing my key from the source, it’d be easy for anyone to decompile the swf, or use fiddler to check the service request. If you want to hide your key you’ll have to use a separate php script to proxy the service request.

Along with this they also require the use of the Kuler logo in your application.

Kuler Logo

Find out all the details for yourself and apply for a key here

Tags: Kuler, kuler api