My First Flash Wii Game

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Jan 01

My First Flash Wii Game - Balloons

Well today I had a play at making a Flash game for the Wii using some rudimentary gesture recognition for the wand style of input. You can see a sneak peek of how the gesture recognition works here:

http://richardleggett.co.uk/wii/gestureRecogDemo.html

So Aral and Mario together have un-earthed some real gems the last couple of days, I think there could be a lot of fun to be had making some Wii games. It's like Flash Lite, even simple games are much more fun when put on another type of device, and with the "wand" style input, it's even more fun.

Anyway, here is my first example, will be uploading source for this when I get back from France in a weeks time. Just visit the following on your Wii (or desktop computer if you don't have one)...

http://richardleggett.co.uk/wii

This is just a quick stab, I'd like to take some time to make it more responsive, I'm just using the 10x10 grid for pattern recognition, without up/downscaling user gestures, so it will be quite inaccurate on occasion, although it is possible to get used to how the game wants you to "gesture", so it is possible to get good (beat my top score of 1800).

Note:
For best results, you must make the gesture (circle, slash or backslash) across the whole Flash movie, i.e. from one corner to another for the slashes, or reasonably large with the circle gesture).

11 comments

§ DannyT said on : 01/01/07 @ 16:21
Love it mate, was waiting for the first Wii app... now I just gotta go get me one.

I think this is going to be a very unexpected and explosive trend amongst the flash dev community and we'll see alot of wii games cropping up. Look forward to it!
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 01/01/07 @ 16:23
You can bet on that mate ;) And cheers for the compliment.
§ Jon said on : 02/01/07 @ 10:18
Loving that mate.
§ Luciano Ayres said on : 02/01/07 @ 10:42
Amazing, man. How does it work to put a swf running on the console? I didnÃ‚Â´t have the chance to play with a wii yet.

You just load the game on the console web browser?

Regards,

Luciano
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 03/01/07 @ 13:20
That's correct, you just visit the page (or this page) directly in the Wii, it's just Opera. And hello there Jon!
§ Luciano Ayres said on : 04/01/07 @ 10:18
Thanks! I shared your game link with a few Flash dev mates and they freaked about it. Nintendo doesnÃ‚Â´t distribute the wii in Brazil, so the only way to get one is indirectly through local e-commerce websites ( too expensive, some people are selling it for US$1,000).

Luciano
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 05/01/07 @ 11:39
Hey Luciano, thanks! I heard there are some Wii's going for some insane prices. I hope you have someone in the U.S. who can ship one to you for less than that.
§ Adam said on : 29/01/07 @ 03:37
Rich,

check out my latest post, I've managed to get my Wiimote hooked up to Flash on the desktop with full 2 way communication. Early days but could be fun...

http://www.dustypixels.com/blog/2007/01/29/wiimote-flash-first-two-way-communication-tests/
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 29/01/07 @ 03:39
Hey Adam, that's pretty cool, unfortunately my bluetooth dongle wasn't compatible with the Wiimote drivers, I really wanted to hook it up to Director 3D, but I may go and get a better dongle at some point. Let me know if you get a nice demo out there!
§ james said on : 30/03/07 @ 05:15
Hi Richard. Good work on the game. Can you tell me how the wii remote key presses work as apose to pc keys, i.e. does the wii remote automatically work as the mouse cursor? How can you use the keyPress functions with the wii remote buttons? I really want to make some games for the wii through Flash but haven't been able to try it out yet. Thanks
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 30/03/07 @ 08:39
Hi james,

Thanks! Yes the Wii remote does act as a one button mouse so nothing special needed there. You can hook into keypresses (other buttons), check this out:

http://aralbalkan.com/825