"Chaotic Neutral"

I’m a southpaw! I do all kinds of things that require a certain degree of eye to hand-coordinated skill with my left hand. This includes using the computer mouse too. So I have the mouse on the left side next to my keyboard with my left hand using the mouse and left part of the keyboard and the right hand using the right side, incl. cursor keys and numeric keyblock.

With a standard keyboard we lefties actually have a  slight advantage over right-handers when it comes to playing First-Person-Shooters or third-person-view games since we have a nicely separated block of keys that we can use for controls with the right hand where right-handers would need to use some obnoxious key layouts in the depths of the left side of their keyboard, in particular the notorious WASD keys.

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Aah, back to the game design topic! The thing I love most about game design is that you can create worlds full of life, intricacy, intrigue and interesting characters, experimenting with scenarios and situations (that would otherwise probably have negative  repercussions in RL™).

As a programmer you’d ever only write your code and if you are happy with it that’s fine but we one-man-game-developer types are more like Jack of all trades who want to create complete worlds … and stories. And then tell those stories by means of the game. And maybe throw a bit (or a large chunk) of dynamics in there again … as programmers.

One extremely satisfying aspect of game design (for games where narrative is important) is the development of characters that should act throughout the game. Creating characters is just as much fun as the other bases! If you do it right and create deep and sympathetic characters people will love them.

And even villains can be sympathetic. In fact they should be! Who likes an antagonist that is completely unsympathetic? Nobody, right? But why should you even like a villain, after all he’s the guy who needs to be defeated? The answer to this is that the guy who is the villain is so only in the context of our story. Maybe he’s not so bad after all in a different context. Or in short: Antagonists also have a life, feelings … but guess what? Now I totally digress! I actually wanted to show you my new and all fresh character template that I came up with to shape out characters for my game.

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Even though I love ActionScript more than my daily meal I’ve recently started to think about if the Flash Platform is actually the right stuff for developing big games. Most Flash game developers write small-scale games for the web which is totally fine and I too like to write a small coffee-break game sometimes but often I’m craving for more! My dream has since long been to design and develop a large-scale role-playing game and I’m usually overflowing from new ideas coming to my mind every day that it’s almost hard to track all of them.

I could go on and make this project an oldschool-style game with 2D graphics like some other indie devs are doing but I feel that going 3D would be the best bet to convey atmosphere and tactical gameplay at the same time (you could use switchable first-person and third-person views). This makes me think if ActionScript is actually sufficient for this but the experience of some of my recent coding tests with Away3D which already start to bog down the CPU with a few hundred polygons on the screen tend to say “no!” to my ambitious plans.

Since this is a desktop game my platform choice is AIR which offers more freedom that the Web Player but there are still many let-downs that make you grind your teeth …

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I’ve been designing on a rather ambitious Role-Playing game project since a while now (in fact quite a long while but I’m not in hurry to finish it anytime soon) and while I’m in the process of working out the story, technical details like the combat mechanics, skill system etc. and creating interesting characters I still haven’t made a decision on the type of graphical projection for the game so far. I’ve been thinking about five kinds of projection from the most basic one (2D orthographic) up to full dynamic 3D which would be quite an effort. As my development platform of choice happens to be Flash, the resources in terms of 3D are limited.

So with that in mind I thought it would be good opportunity to introduce some of the most-used projections in computer and video role-playing games to get to know them a little better. This is by no means a complete list of all sorts of projection used in games but I believe these the ones most commonly used for role-playing games.

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Let’s burrow some in my FDT templates crate … how often do you have to add a child display object to another display object? If the answer is ‘very often’ then this small FDT template might save you some time.

${property} = new ${cursor};
addChild(${property});

It’s very simple but effective. Usage: Let’s for example name this template “newDisplayObject” and after invoking it with CTRL+SPACE you start typing the name of the display object property that you defined as a class property before which then should be auto-completed, then you hit TAB and then CTRL+SPACE to quick-insert the type after the ‘new’ operator (FDT is finding the correct type for you) and Voila, you’re finished, no need to add that extra ‘addChild’ manually.

Probably old news but I’ve just found some time to read about the recently released pushbutton engine, a modular ActionScript 3 engine tailored especially for game development. It seems that Jeff Tunnel & Co (of Garage Games fame) were sitting down and wrote some serious ActionScript library overnight.

“…and a component system which lets you easily package game functionality into reusable modules. The component system draws on nearly a decade of game development history…”

This looks very promising indeed and the component structure makes a lot of sense.

I’ve been working on the hexagonLib on and off but time is sparse currently and so it seems I would never get it into a decent release state. I Might as well see how the pb engine works out for me. Let’s see how this engine fits for my current role-playing game project!