We have been keeping a little secret here at Oman3D about a new project that we launched at the start of April during the annual eGames conference held at the Knowledge Oasis Muscat. This secret is about Chemical Orange, a portal for playing free mobile phone created using Flash Lite.

The idea behind Chemical Orange is to make games which are representative of our local Omani culture and  yet simple and fun to play. We think that we were successful in doing that. We got linked to by one of the two mobile phone operators in the country and our games were downloaded more than 50,000 times within a period that did not exceed three weeks. This is counting only downloads made over-the-air and not downloads made from the actual website. We also do not DRM our games, so users can save them and share them with their friends as they please.

We currently have two games in our catalog, both of which are made using Flash Lite 1.1 to ensure the highest number of compatible devices. We created the games using Flash CS3 and tested using Device Central CS3, two tools that proved the excellence of Adobe’s tools in the field of mobile content production.

We provided users with two methods for downloading the games, the first is by visiting our regular Flash website, select the phone model to download the appropriate game version and then leave the user to transfer the game to his phone as he sees fit, the second method is by downloading the game directly over the air by visiting the mobile portal of Chemical Orange, select the game and phone model and then just play.

Our games also feature a highscore  board feature that lets users submit their score and have their name shown if they get a score within the top five.

You can check out Chemical Orange by visiting our full website or alternatively by visiting m.chemicalorange.com from your mobile phone browser. All our games are free of charge, so you have no excuse not to try them out!

We had an awesome time at eGames yesterday, the annual gaming conference organised by the Knowledge Oasis Muscat. It was a great opportunity to meet people interested in gaming and technology and it was also a opportunity to hear about the latest applications of serious gaming (gaming for educational purposes), virtual reality gaming, and gaming for the promotion of heritage and culture in the UK. And oh yeah, there was a bit on mobile phone gaming, but we’ll talk about that in another post.

The eGames conference is not your average gaming expo, you will not likely hear about the latest PS3 or Wii game in it, but instead it will hear a lot about using games for creating new effective methods for teaching, the usage of gaming for spread and preserving art and culture, and the usage of gaming for the promotion of tourism.

The majority of speakers were experts in alternative uses of gaming from the UK. Interesting examples were showcased by PIXELearning illustrating the possibility to create effective training programs using virtual words such as a GTA-like game used to train medical staff.

The second most discussed topic at eGames was the use of gaming for the promotion of tourism and culture, which is a topic that our country Oman could benefit easily benefit from if implemented well. Oman is a country rich with culture and unique architecture which the world would enjoy seeing and exploring in cyberspace for sure.

eGames first day was concluded by a session of mobile phone games, which we will discuss in a separate post for reason’s you will soon know! You can learn more about the topics discussed at eGames by viewing the conference’s blog here.

New details are emerging about the upcoming eGames 2008 conference to be held next month in Muscat. Profiles of key speakers can now be seen on the eGames Oman Blog, such key speakers include David Wortley - Director of the Serious Games Institute at Coventry University; Professor Lizbeth Goodman - Founder and Director of the SMARTlab Digital Media Institute and the MAGIC Multimedia & Games Innovation Center, Gamelab and PLAYroom; Dr Sara de Freitas - Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute at the University of Coventry; Mike Gogan - Blitz Games; Dick Davies - Executive Producer of Ambient Performance; and many other experts who will share their experience in the fields of gaming for education purposes (serious gaming), using virtual reality games for the promotion of tourism, and mobile phone gaming.

You can learn more about of these speakers and the eGames conference on the eGames Oman Blog.

Playyoo, the social network for playing and creating mobile phone games using the Flash Lite platform, has recently finally bypassed its private testing phase and can now be accessed as a beta launch by anyone. The easiest way to think of Playyoo is as a YouTube for Flash Lite games: anybody can upload their own Flash Lite games or even build one using the online game creator available on the website. All the games are then available for the public to download for free on their mobile phones. We did not try uploading a Flash Lite game to Playyoo, but playing games from its mobile portal was a breeze. Flash Lite developers looking for inspiration or a place to publish their games on should seriously check it out.

[via TechCrunch]

Knowledge Oasis Muscat (KOM) has announced that its annual gaming conference eGames will be held on the 31st of March and the 1st of April 2008 at KOM HQ in Rusail. (See our coverage of the last eGames here.) The conference will focus as usual on gaming for education purposes, gaming for the promotion of tourism, and mobile gaming - all of which are fields that the Sultanate of Oman and local business could make use of.

The sessions of the conference will be delivered by a number of academics, virtual reality game developers, and telecom industry professionals. A workshop on Second Life on the second day of the conference will be conducted by David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute of Coventry University.

Conference entry fees, if any would be charged, have not been announced yet. Conference updates will be posted on the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE) Blog.

Microsoft released today a new version of its Xbox360 and Windows game development platform XNA. XNA was released last year as a free tool for hobbyists and studios alike to easily develop games using Visual C# 2005 Express Edition and Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework. The new XNA Game Studio 2.0 offers 15 new features from which the most note worthy is the ability to create online multiplayer games for the both the Xbox360 and Windows through Xbox LIVE. Learn more about this new release from XNA’s official page.

Adobe released yesterday device profile update #4 for Device Central CS3 , the mobile phone emulation tool for testing and debugging Flash Lite content on your computer. 49 new mobile device profiles are added in this update bringing the total number of model profiles in Device Central to 364.

Device Central provides a database of mobile phones specifications and supported Flash Lite featured, it also allows the user to emulate these device and test created Flash Lite games and movies on the computer itself.

You can learn more about this latest update for Device Central from its online portal here.

[via Flash Devices]

A new advertising network that could be of great interest to Flash game developers is MochiAds. This advertisement network provides developers with the opportunity to monetize their games with online advertisement easily. In the past, game developers had to look for and negotiate sponsorship deals with advertisers in order to be able to make money out of their games and that was not easy at all. Using MochiAds anybody can implement the advertisement code within his Flash game and generate money depending on how much traffic his game receives. MochiAds directly deals with the advertisers and takes a share of the profit with performing games on the network.

The interesting thing about Mochi is that it offers three different kinds of advertisement including one in-game solution for showing the advertisement while the game is played. MochAds also offers free hosting and traffic analysis services for game developers using the MochiAds network. However, currently MochiAds makes its payment for game publishers through paypal only.

You can learn more about MochiAds by visiting its official website.

Natural Motion announced today the release of its new animation system, Morpheme. Morpheme is the industry’s first graphically-authorable animation engine for Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. It has been designed from the ground up to give animators unprecedented control over the final look of their animations in-game. Morpheme consists of a run-time animation engine, morpheme:runtime and a powerful 3D authoring application for animators morpheme:connect. You can read more in the official site, or Register and watch a sneak preview demonstrating the work flow in morpheme:connect.

WiiCade.com recently accomplished another achievement in the Flash development scene for the Nintendo Wii by releasing a software that allows Flash developers to interact with Flash movies using the buttons of the Wii game remote. Flash developers were previously only able to make use of motion sensing features of the Wii-mote and had no access to the buttons or the tilt sensing features (which remains inaccessible). This new software shall open up many new opportunities for independent developers for creating Flash games and applications for the Wii. You can learn more about the Wii-mote button API and download it for free at WiiCade.com.

[via Joystiq]