PushButton: Powerful open source Flash game engine

[mouser]

This looks like extremely exciting news for developers interested in making high quality Flash games.. It's a new open source flash game engine called PushButton Engine, and it looks very impressive, including physics, tilemaps, and networking.

The PushButton Engine is an open-source [FLASH] game engine and framework that's designed for a new generation of games. This game engine helps you spend less time with code conventions and more time designing fun experiences.

• Physics based on Box2D.
• Gameplay components: health, teams, state machines.
• Sprite-based and SWF-based 2D rendering.
• Tilemap system.
• Pathfinding library.
• Basic networking. Pass events to/from your servers, do XMLRPC/JSON Web API requests, etc.
• Awesome UI capabilities via Flash - localizable, stylable/themable, internationalizable.
• Editor
• Easy to customize and extend for your game, based on the components you are using.
• Human-readable XML formats, so easy to do automated processing, use other editors, convert from external sources, etc.
• Written in Flash, so runs everywhere PushButton Engine does.
• Advanced Networking Library

http://pushbuttonengine.com/

from http://www.salon.com/

[Deozaan]

Wow. Thanks for the random decision to sign into Twitter I just noticed this post.

Sounds cool. I'll have to look more into it.

[mahesh2k]

Interesting. Nice Find 

[Deozaan]

I'd heard about PushButtonLabs from Jeff Tunnel's blog Make It Big in Games, but I didn't realize they were creating an Open Source engine. But it makes sense, considering he says he thinks that games are going to be getting cheaper and cheaper until they are free. Or at least for some markets.

As an example of the future, look at the game section of the iPhone App Store. In this market, the right price for a game is $0, and I believe that is where all game prices are heading. For a while, there will be successes at $3.99 to $1, but eventually, I think you will see capitulation to the $0 price point.

Why are games going to what many see as absurdly low price points? It is a simple answer. Supply and demand. It used to be difficult and expensive to make games, so few people had the knowledge to create a game, and even if you could figure out how to make a game, there were only a few distribution outlets. There was no Internet, so only a few games could be brought to the few shelves open to selling them. With relatively few games being made, and fewer being distributed via hard media, games were scarce, resulting in high price points.

-http://makeitbigingames.com/2009/02/game-pricing-look-out-below/