Monday, March 21, 2011

Learning PushButton Engine


I have spent the last 2 weeks trying to get my head around PushButton Engine. The engine was recommended to be through online communities and groups and seemed to be a great engine but what I found a nuisance was the lack straight forward documentation to get up and running to where I wanted to be. Most of the examples I found were through the PushButton Engine website, Google Code, Blogs, Forums. This is the process I went through to learn it hopefully it will help someone somewhere. I firstly downloaded the engine and followed the get started instructions which was very helpful and straight forward and explained how to set it up using different software. Then I began to learn the architecture of PushButton Engine. I then completed the 5 lessons on the docs section and read through the references section which goes through all the basics needed to understand the specific parts of how the engine works. The best advice I could give is to understand the XML level file or templates as it is the key of why PushButton engine has so much potential. There is also video tutorials that explain concepts involved in the engine they are in general 5 minute long and well worth watching. The best tutorials I came across were Matthew Capersons Hubfolio. They create a working example with all the concepts used appropriately. Matthew shows show templates and levels are used correctly and effectively. Another good blog I found helpful were Nate Becks a developer in the PushButton Engine team. Another developer who contributes to the open source project PushButton Engine is Lavon Woods who has created an Isometric Component for PushButton Engine and added video tutorials on the basics of PushButton Engine. To see how a project is generated in Flex or Flash or Flash Develop click here. If you explore through these you will see how they are generated and what files are put where. After 2 weeks of going through it all i figure I have a good understanding of it but if I knew where to find all the related documentation it definitely would have been a quicker process.

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