Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
free and many are completely cloud-based (written using HTML5 technologies),
if you're looking for an enterprise level tool to help you build professional anima-
tions truly similar to what we're used to seeing with Adobe Flash, you'll need to
invest in some cash in more advanced and fine tuned tools. Although some of
these tools may not be the best option for a developer on a budget (or one with
no budget at all), their quality and power are normally orders of magnitude bey-
ond whatever any of the free tools can provide.
If you're only developing for fun, or for the learning experience, the plethora of
free tools available online should be more than enough to get you going with
CSS3 keyframe animations. However, if your goal is to build high-end applica-
tions and you need the high precision and control over the animations, then a
professional tool might be well worth your investment.
One particularly popular free web-based CSS animation generator can be found
at
http://www.css3maker.com/
. On the other hand, Adobe makes a terrific
product called Adobe Edge Animate, which can be purchased at
ht-
The text shadows
This new text attribute in CSS allows you to simulate a shadow effect around text.
Behind the scenes, what the browser really does is create a copy of the text that the
shadow is being applied to, then displace it behind the original text based on the val-
ues you specify as the vertical and horizontal offset. You can also tell the browser
how much to blur this "shadow" version of the text by specifying a values between
zero and whatever integer value you desire. After a point, depending on the size of
the original text, the blur is so high that the text is virtually invisible, so supplying very
large numbers can be counter productive.
The only instance in the game where text shadow is used is in the message contain-
er's title. Since the rest of the user interface for the game used pretty flat graphics
with very subtle or no gradients at all, I thought I'd use text shadows to add a solid,
lighter shadow to give continuation to the theme of flat, single dimensional graphics.
