Announcing as3cards Google Code Project

I'm pleased to announce that I've got the as3cards Google Code Project up and running. The as3cards project provides a skinnable ActionScript 3.0 card engine for creating playing card games, with an example implementation of Klondike Solitaire.

You can view the example implementation of Klondike here.

This is essentially a continuation of my over-a-year-and-a-half old ActionScript 3.0 Klondike game, that was showcased on labs back in the early days when we still had Flash Player 8.5.

Originally I had included this in IFBIN. When IFBIN disbanded I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the code. I spent a lot of time writing it and wanted to try to get something out of all the time that I put into it, so I didn't want to just blindly release it as open source.

Time passed, and I become involved in a lot of other work as my consulting business really picked up. The Klondike code was left to gather dust on my hard drive. After mostly forgetting about it, I've been contacted by a few people recently that put it in the front of my mind again. I figured that since it's been so long and I haven't done anything with the code yet, I might as well just put it out there as open source and let others run with it.

So, I went through the (very old) code base and updated it to work with the latest build of Flash Player. I've committed the source code into the as3cards Google Code Repository, and released it under the MIT license.

Also, I've built a simple Flex 2 shell that loads the ActionScript-only game and plunks it on the stage. You can use as3cards in both ActionScript-only (plain ol' Flash) projects, or you can inject the card engine into a Flex application.

This project was somewhat hard to part with because of my time invested in it, and the potential market of selling it to people that want Flash poker sites... but in the end, I think this is the right decision and I hope that you find it useful. If you'd like to help contribute (with maybe a FreeCell implementation, or a new skin, or anything), let me know. Donations (and/or ad clicks) are welcome, of course, but not expected.

Enjoy!