The guys from GameDuell wrote us a really nice user story that we don’t want to hold back. GameDuell successfully develops Flash games with FDT. Thank you guys for sharing your story!

“The use of the FDT refactoring- and advanced code-navigation tools allows maintaining our source code across projects that are being written by many different developers. FDT gives us the power we need in order to be agile and have clean code at the same time.”
Daniel Döller, Lead Flash Developer

The Challenge:

GameDuell has developed 60 flash-based games in our own studios and embedded them in a unique tournament platform that enhances social gameplay. GameDuell is available on its own brand website as well as on partner sites, social networks, and the iPhone. GameDuell produces fast, productive games and for the developing we need simple and powerful tools.

The Solution:

Using a debugger is an immense improvement of the workflow. The ability to remote-debug is the biggest advantage for us because we are able to debug the application inside the real online scenario and not just locally in a “fake” environment, which can never reflect the live-version completely. Due to the amount of Flash developers it was always a risky task to change something inside the existing libraries. Now we have refactoring features and can finally preview all changes which are being made by renaming classes or properties. Therefore, the process of applying changes is much smoother and more predictable than before.

The History:

GameDuell was founded in 2003 with the vision to combine social games with innovative transaction models. Our passion for high-quality games and a thrilling user experience has made GameDuell one of the best monetizing, as well as one of the largest, casual games communities in the world. Our products are available in 7 languages and are played by more than 12 million people every month.
Our network of more than 200 distribution partners includes the most prominent Internet portals and game sites in the world. The company is driven by a team of over 170 game-enthusiasts and has offices in Berlin and San Francisco.

Conclusion:

For us working and developing with FDT is productive and fun!

We just uploaded a first test version of FDT 3.0 Enterprise. You can download the pre release version from the update site “http://fdt.powerflasher.com/update_beta/”. The two most important new features are refactoring and debugging.

• To debug you can set breakpoints (double click at the left side of the editor) and start your application with “Debug as…->FDT AS3 Application”). Please consider that all SWFs you use need to be debugable (if you use multiple SWFs make sure all are compiled with “-debug=true”). You can watch the stack trace and variables, step into/over/out (F5/F6/F7) and even can modify primitive variable values at runtime. If you hover over a variable inside the editor of the current stack element, the value of this variable is shown. You can even format this output using special templates (in the preferences under “FDT->Run/Debug->Reference Types”). There are some predefined templates at the moment, expect more to come (we take suggestions seriously!). Of course you can define your own templates.

• The implemented refactorings are: “Rename top level type”, “Rename method”, “Rename variable”, “Rename package” and “Move type”. You can drag and drop classes/interfaces in the flash explorer and all references (such as imports) are updated automatically. The most important hotkey is <alt>+<shift>+R to rename the element under the cursor. If you place it over a variable name the variable would be renamed, over a type name and the type would be renamed and so on. With <alt>+<shift>+V you can move a selected top level type to a new location.

Please also consider that you can only test the enterprise features if you do not enter a key for basic or professional. If you already use FDT we would suggest to install the beta in different eclipse installation to try out the new features.

We wish pure coding comfort!

The enterprise version of FDT 3.0 dashes forward. We have implemented the most important refactorings such as “Move Type” or “Rename Method” and the debugger takes shape rapidly. We are increasing our support team and expect the enterprise version to be released in march when all testings are finished.

The first version will ship without extended MXML support which is planned to be implemented in Q2/Q3 2008.

To boost FDT with even more power we are looking for an additional FDT full time developer. In two words: Power Up! And if you want to become part of the team, send your application to jobs@powerflasher.de