Developing mini games for the Conduit Engine is a great new opportunity. The concept of creating a game that is always in the margins of the user’s work area, is actually defining a new genre – Background Gaming. While having to be engaging and fun, such games must let users “focus out” frequently, returning to their other browser activities.

The Conduit Engine supports the most popular runtimes for online gaming – Adobe Flash, Silverlight, and of course HTML and JavaScript. This is great, as pre-existing games can be easily adjusted for the engine, plus – developing dedicated games requires no additional technical skills.

That said, games running as a browser app must fit a very unique format. Game height may not exceed the engine bar height (that’s 26 pixels!), and game width should be the minimum possible, leaving some space for other components on the engine bar. And as the game is always on the bar, performance and usability issues should be considered with extra care.

In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to embed a fully working flash game as a browser app.

Topics covered in this tutorial:

• Developing the game
• Creating an HTML component
• Flash plugin behavior in the toolbar
• How to embed Flash
• How to detect Flash version
• Conduit API
• Game show/hide mechanism

In order to follow the examples of this tutorial, you need the following:

Conduit account
If you don’t have one already, go to www.conduit.com and open one up for free. A conduit account provides you with your own toolbar, which you can customize and distribute.

Tutorial files
Download tutorial files and sample projects.

Hosting for the game files
When publishing your games, you will need to upload all the game files onto a hosting server of your choice.

Flash Player
To be able to view a game on the engine bar, you will need the Flash Plugin installed on your browser.

Prerequisite knowledge
You should have basic understanding of HTML and JavaScript, and the Flash SWF file format and usage within a standard HTML page.