Hi,

I was curious to know what all technologies are used in making a farmville style game. I understand that you need a solid game concept first.

I had a few questions regarding that.

1) Is an isometric engine needed for the flash work.
2) Are the individual user worlds rendered using xml?
3) What is the preferred backend language to make such games?
4) Is there any tutorial to make a flash social game like farmville or cafe world?

Thanks for your time.

Nishant

Quote:1) Is an isometric engine needed for the flash work.

What do you mean by this? If you are asking if it's necessary to use an existing library of code, designed for rendering isometric views, the answer is no. Whether this is a good or bad engineering decision is a different question.

Quote:2) Are the individual user worlds rendered using xml?

XML is not a programming language. Thus, XML is not rendering anything. That would be the Flash programming language: Actionscript, perhaps in tandem with other components.

Quote:3) What is the preferred backend language to make such games?

There isn't one. A number of languages are in use.

Quote:4) Is there any tutorial to make a flash social game like farmville or cafe world?

No, just as there isn't a tutorial to fashion any other large, complex product.

Despite the seeming simplicity of a game like Farmville, it is probably much harder than you might realize. Don't expect to throw something together in a week and profit.

If your interested in isometric tile 3rd party libs for flash, I can recommend as3isolib (http://code.google.com/p/as3isolib/).

Cafe World uses a 3D engine for rendering (Away3D I believe). But you wouldn't have to go that route. If you get the correct art made the game can just be 2D as far as Flash is concered. Farmville I'm not sure about but I think it does it this way instead of true 3D.

What do you mean by "backend"? Storing game data? SQL is probably your best bet there since its made to deal with huge databases. Serving data? ElectroServer and SmartFox are the two big ones for Flash. We use ElectroServer at work and it does a pretty good job. Can use Java to write processors to do what you need to do if it doesn't already support what you need.

Thanks all for your replies. I am just trying to make a very basic flash based social game. It will be a huge learning curve for me to try to do that.

I was basically looking at how to make a tile based flash game. I mean is there any tut which demonstrates how to get that select buildings and dragging it to the square the user wants and then flash saves it to our server. I wanted some guidance on doing that sort of a thing.

Thanks for the smartfox and electroserver links. I think I will get to learn quite a lot from there.

Thanks for the help

Nishant