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Comment by ghempton | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for all the great feedback. This is a side project that I had been sitting on at 90% completion for months and finally got it out.

As a side note: I need to remember to not publicize newly launched apps until they have been indexed by the app store. It might not show up in the app store search until tomorrow.

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It showed up in my search today.

did you make the artwork yourself?

Everything was done by yours truly in Fireworks. I wrote a custom extension that I use to create both the artwork and the levels inside of Fireworks.

Would love to see a writeup on your tool chain and how you put this together.

Fireworks has been my go-to graphics tool for years. What exactly does your extension do as opposed to using symbols?

The level design and artwork are done simultaneously inside of Fireworks. I have an extension which attaches metadata to objects to use in-game. I also rely on states and pages to correspond to animations and levels respectively. I.e. all of the levels of the game are "compiled" from a single fireworks doc with 20 pages, each page corresponding to a level.

That is great! It's definitely one of the most clever and unique uses I've seen of Fireworks. Hopefully, someone from Adobe is reading so they can recommend it as an article on the Fireworks Developer Center (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks.edu.html).

Amazing! Are you planning to opensource this extension? It's very interesting to look inside.

Great to hear someone else using Fireworks. I feel like it gets ignored by Adobe in favour of Illustrator, but it's really a fantastic tool.

+1, in fact I'm still a fireworks 8 junkie, I still can't find a better product for web layout and super quick vector/raster work.

+1 to that as well. Fireworks is indispensable as part of my design tool chain. It's the best and simplified world of illustrator and photoshop.

I sent the link to my ipad and opened it from there, and whala it shows up.

at the risk of negative karma; voilà.

Thanks... I actually know that, but I guess I had a brain fart. That and I was distracted playing the game.

Yeah it is a great game, you need to think in a broader fashion than angry birds. It is kind of like the difference between protecting something vs attacking it a la computer security; protecting takes more forethought.

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