Gareth Jones

After seeing Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge, Nourish Interactive asked us to make a simplified version for the 4-10 year old kids who use their website.

The ball mechanics were simplified a little and the wind was removed. The branding was of course changed to reflect that of their website, with the starring roles going to Alex and Jasmine.

For more information and screen-shots, head over to Quak Multimedia.

In the early hours of this morning I got an email from Quak Multimedia’s GameWrapper alerting me to the fact that someone from Uruguay had become the first person to try to steal some software from me. They tried to steal Quak Wordsearch. They downloaded the wrapper and then ran it on their local machine. In fact, they ran it twice.

Thanks to GameWrapper, they were presented with a message that told them that the request was unauthorised and they were prevented from playing.

GameWrapper not only allows for you to specify who can play your content and who can’t, but it also tracks and records usage around the world and alerts you to any unauthorised attempts to run your content.

GameWrapper isn’t listed on the Quak website as it’s not so much a product but more of a tool that I developed to serve its games, but if you’d like the technology to help protect your content then get in touch.

Name that Note is spin-off that focuses on improving people’s pitch-recognition over the treble clef. This time around, the note in question is played rather than shown, and you must guess the correct note simply from what you hear. You can replay the note as many times as you like, though of course the clock is always ticking so best not hang around hitting the Replay button for too long!

Once you’ve made a guess – whether you’re right or wrong – you’ll get to see the note in question on the stave for a couple of seconds before the game moves onto the next note.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.

A few weeks back we were commissioned by Bug Interactive to develop a viral game for the Active Ashfield initiative and to promote the launch of their new website. The brief was to develop a sports-themed game that featured their two food-based characters (Brocky and Peggy) which would promote healthy eating and an active lifestyle.

The result is Active Ashfield’s Conversion Challenge, a game that tasks the user with scoring as many conversions as they can within the two minute time limit. It’s not quite as easy as it sounds though, as you have to factor dynamic wind (both in terms of direction and speed) and variable kicking power into your aiming!

For more information and screen-shots, head over to Quak Multimedia.

Name that Note is a Flash game that improves the user’s music-reading skills by tasking them to read music from 2 different clefs through 3 different difficulty levels. The challenge is to correctly name as many notes as you can within a time limit, with the higher difficulty settings giving you more difficult notes to work with in less time. Scores are saved to a leader board to promote friendly rivalry.

The game has proven to be very popular among music enthusiasts and has received very positive feedback.

For more information and screen-shots or to buy the game, please visit Quak Multimedia.

Following on from the previous post about protecting your code with obfuscation, an obvious statement would be that the best way to protect your work is to ensure that no-one gets a copy of it! However once you put your work online, anyone with a cable or broadband connection could download it and make copies of it. Is the only option then to stop making your work available for download? Of course such drastic measures would prevent anyone from seeing your work at all and make developing a product totally pointless, but what if there was a compromise between the two? What if there could be a difference between what you gave people and what they actually saw on-screen when they ran that file?

Having a “key” file (which I’ll refer to as the Key) to access a “resource” file (which I’ll refer to as the Resource) centrally also means only ever having one location for that Resource, and so if you were to spot a bug in your Resource or if you wanted to add a feature, you’d only have to replace a single file for that change to permeate instantly throughout the internet.

Since your Resource would only ever be run centrally, this also opens the door for tracking. You’d be able to see who was accessing your resource and how often. If the Key was to provide information on where it was being run from you’d also be able to control the locations that had access to that Resource, and in effect you’d be making an “intelligent” Key that only worked for certain people.

All of this serves as the foundation for a piece of software that I have developed and called the Game Wrapper. Although called the Game Wrapper because I wanted to use it to serve my games to different websites, the same technology would actually work with any type of resource – games, animations, elearning etc.

I use Game Wrapper to serve games to various online gaming websites, so I know that every site has the same version of the game and if I ever want to add or change something in any of my games, I make that change once and upload the new file to my server and that new version instantly becomes the version that everyone is playing.

Game Wrapper also allows me to specify whether games are allowed to be played locally on a user’s machine or online only. If online only, I can also specify which websites are allowed to play it and this ensures that no-one steals the game to use it without my permission. If the game is ever run from a site that hasn’t been added to the Allowed list, I get an email that tells me which game has been run illegally and from which website.

I can also serve adverts before the game starts to load or I can serve the game right away – whatever’s best for any particular game.

Developers will know that when a Flash file downloads another Flash file, the downloaded file is stored in “Temporary Internet Files” so the scenario with which I opened the post about ensuring that users don’t ever get access to the Resource isn’t strictly true, but despite physically being on that user’s machine the file will only run if it’s run from the host website, only if it’s run from a Key, and only if the user is on the Allowed list.

Both the Keys and the Resources are also run through SWF Encrypt for an added layer of security.