Tag Archives: Game Development

Cover E3 With Kotaku: I Am Not the Chosen One

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Yes, that’s right: Kotaku will be without the immense blessing of my presence and personality during their E3 Expo coverage in June. In a follow up to yesterday’s post, I wanted to inform my faithful readers that I was not able to snag the victory in the writing contest and claim my role as a game reporter for the week. Am I disappointed? Absolutely. But, I must acknowledge that I was quite encouraged to have made it as far as I did, and I hope that I may possibly find a little recognition out of the whole thing.

Let me once again express my deepest thanks to Kotaku for even presenting such an opportunity as this. I am thrilled to have had any part at all, and – after asking specifically how badly I had lost – when Brian informed me that I actually came in third in their vote, I figured that is nothing to sneeze at. Third place in a contest that determines the next attendee to the pinnacle of video game summits: indeed, not a bad place to be at all. However, the sting of “so close but yet so far away” is definitely there.
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Simple Actionscript Shooter Phase 1 (AS3)

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Well, OK, it’s not much of a Phase 1 – more like Phases 1, 2 and 3 all rolled into one simple demo, but for my purposes, the name will suffice. Many different ideas and techniques have been rolling around in my head for months, and I finally decided to try and find a simple way to implement some of those ideas into a working model; and what better way to do so than a classic shooter?

With flash gaming sites like Kongregate and ArmorGames offering incentives – and even revenue – to developers, I thought it about time to start put something together and just see what comes of it. Obviously, I have a long way to go, but here is a preview of a little application on which I am currently working.
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Map Handling Take 3 – Hover Over Borders (AS3)

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Well, at the risk of sensory overload today – it’s my blog after all – I decided to post one more version of my map handler. This one adds in the classic mouse hover scroll effect at the edges of the map. I did try to make it a bit more usable, though, by calculating the distance from the edge of the map and accelerating the movement appropriately. So, the closer to the edge you are, the faster the map scrolls. So, to recap, you can use the following methods to move:
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Consistent Omnidirectional Movement in AS3

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One of my biggest gripes in Flash games to date is that of simulated motion that is by no means realistic. True, this may be acceptable for some games, but as a whole, there is something that just doesn’t feel right when your side scrolling shooter plane moves up one unit when you press UP, left one unit when you press LEFT but moves both up and left one entire unit when you have both keys depressed. Logically, by moving in two directions at once, your character or vehicle should not be granted an additional bonus to their movement speed. Not only does it offer unfair advantages to the competent player who learns to use this loophole to his advantage, but it also makes your control somewhat unwieldy. The human brain is able to estimate precise movements and predict where things should go, and some people, though they may not know the precise reasons, will gravitate to those games that their minds can accurately predict the outcome of a motion.

If you have read my last few posts, you understand that this more realistic motion has driven me to all sorts of physics and algorithmic studies in the past weeks. Today, though, I decided to write on something a bit more fun. Those of you who remember the great old days of R. C. Pro-Am, Super Off Road or other top view racing games can attest to both the challenge and creativity about learning to control a car driving in an omnidirectional world without having to sit directly behind the wheel.
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Tower Defense in AS3 – Part IV

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Many of you have been waiting patiently for this post, and let me say that I have worked many hours to get this where it is today. I wanted to get my code to the point where it was solid enough that I would actually publish something with it, and I believe it is there. Thanks to those who have encouraged me to finish this post, and I look forward to seeing how it is used!

In introduction, let me say a few things about this post: first, I have tried to alter my scope slightly in order to be more accessible to readers who may not have access to a full licensed copy of Flash. So, to help with that and make these lessons more accessible, I have decided to write them in such a way as to be compiled by the Flex SDK, a fully open source framework to allow anyone to build robust Flash applications. I prefer to use the full Flex Developer 3 for development and release, but even without it, you can compile full AS3 or Flex applications using only the SDK from the command line. One other major benefit to doing my development with Flex Builder is the ability to publish my source code for all to view online as well as download.

Obviously, this opens up the accessibility to a much broader range of individuals looking to learn Actionscript 3 or Flex. So, all this to say that the code in this post, while doing practically the same thing as the previous posts (and keeping the majority of the same logic), cleans up a ton of structural issues to lend itself more cleanly towards a completed project. That being said, we are simply focusing on the Tower object itself this time. I will leave it to your imagination and time to read through the rest of the cleaned – and fully documented, I might add – code. I may find time to write some more generalized posts on the Flex framework itself in days to come, but for now, suffice to say that the main file that is compiled as the application (in our case, called “MagicTD.as”) will be instantiated as the main() function and will serve as our entire platform base. You will notice on line 12 of this file all the variables needed to set up our SWF with the desired dimensions, background color and framerate.

So, without further ado, let’s jump right into our Tower class.
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Tower Defense in AS3 – Part III

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I decided to take a slightly different approach to Phase III of this series than I had initially intended, since there was a little restructuring that needed to be done in order to support a cleaner and more efficient system. The intent was to have this post cover the basic solution to the towers themselves, but after getting back into the code, it made more sense to discuss stage structure, wave management and creep variety first. This way, we will actually have something on which to test our towers when we make them.

When you finish reading this post, you will have the ability to customize your waves via an XML file along with defining the path of the road — and therefore the creeps — in the same XML document. Allowing for customization in this way will pave the way for building a framework that can be enhanced for many different uses.
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Tower Defense in AS3 – Part II

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In this segment, we will be covering creep movement within a map, and to stay true with our original intent, everything in this tutorial will be drawn manually using the graphics package in the Sprite object within Flash. This way, we don’t have to worry about downloading images or the file size involved with such extras. Of course, were this a real TD game to be published, we would whip up some original artwork and animations to give our game a little more flair, but in this case, the simpler the better!

The code additions you can expect to find in Part II of this series include drawing our map (or “road”), creating and moving our creeps along that road and recognizing when a creep has completed the course successfully. Anyone familiar with Tower Defense games will recognize the importance of having a trigger to know when each creep finishes. Depending on the rules of your particular game, you may wish to have the creep run another circuit upon completion or simply vanish from existence, but in either case, there will be significant effects from that little guy getting away. Sometimes it costs us money to banish him back to the beginning, and in other games, we simply lose one of our lives and take one step closer to defeat.
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Tactics RPG via Google App Engine

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Tactics RPG screenshotWhile somewhat old news to some, the Google App Engine is an amazing tool allowing developers to tap into the scalability offered by the Google framework while developing entirely standalone applications. What’s more, along with the offer of the code base to build from, Google also allows developers to host their projects, at no cost, on the Google App Engine server (up to 10 applications per user, no less). I was excited to learn of the project initially, and the more I have delved into it, the more enthralled I have become.

For years now, I have wanted to have the means by which to develop a small tactics style RPG game, and while I have had the basic coding knowledge needed (not to mention buckets of ideas), it has been difficult to bring myself to the point of actually taking on such a daunting task. Having the opportunity to build on the data store and framework Google has offered with their App Engine has given me that extra little boost to begin development on one of my long time goals. Continue reading →

Happy New Year!

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Well, I suppose it is high time to write my next entry. I never intended to take a two month lapse in writing, but then again, when does anyone plan to leave their blog unmanned for that length of time? Holidays, children and work all combined over the new year to make for a rather hectic time. I’ll address each of these throughout this post, so if it gets to be a rather lengthy read, I apologize in advance.
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