The life of a wannabe Games Programmer
In game development randomness is often necessary for certain tasks, be it the random distribution of graphic tiles, a random factor in NPC AI or random stats in a roleplaying game. Especially for the latter purpose the static Dice class provides a set of methods to roll dice as it is common in a Role-playing game, to be exact four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, twenty-sided and percentile dice.
The AnimatedBitmap class provides functionality for Bitmap objects that are animated by using a series of still images. When creating a new AnimatedBitmap you provide a BitmapData object that contains an image that consists of the ’single-frame’ images for the animation.
Still have a skeptical opinion about using Flash for making games? Read and rethink … at least for earning money it seems to pay off if done right! Check out this interview with Desktop Tower Defense creator Paul Preece! Obviously it is possible to create a monthly 8000$ revenue just by putting together a simple but addictive Flash Game and make it freely available to people.
Even though personally I’m not too impressed with the game (prefer better graphics/sounds) I found myself getting lost by its addictive gameplay for at least 30 minutes today. Why the heck do I sit here designing an overly complex roleplaying game??! To answer that question by myself: Because it’s what I love doing and its fun for me. But maybe I’m better off devoting some time to create a simple blockbuster first!
So what makes this game so addictive that people are coming back en masse? First and foremost it’s simple and straightforward. No long introduction, no necessity to read instructions, you get into the game quickly. Then there is the addiction factor … Maybe its just me but the reason why it is fun to play is because you try to make your defense perfect to stop the intruding enemies. Another factor is that you can shoot and destroy something. Sounds dumb? I know, but I can imagine that many people’s ‘hunting’ instinct is triggered by that. After all many popular games follow the same scheme. In fact you don’t even need to do the shooting as that is what your towers are doing for you. You just have to place them in a strategically good position and watch how well it works out. The author sure made a good choice by picking a Tower Defense game for this!
Now there are hundreds of other well proven addictive games out there. Make your choice and don’t forget to improve it by adding something that makes it even more fun to play! Meanwhile excuse me … I have to dig through my old games collection and do some searching … 
Here’s a small demo that I threw together yesterday which shows how the effects in the Hexagon Framework effects package can be used. The effects package contains classes that are used on display objects to apply an animated effect on them. That is not all however. The effects send a signal back to the calling class when they are finished and there are two more classes with that effects can be arranged, namely the EffectChainer class and the EffectCombiner class.
A valuable resource for everyone who is thinking/planning to write a roleplaying game … Indie developer Planewalker Games who are currently making their debut RPG The Broken Hourglass are publishing precious bits of insider information about their game engine called WeiNGINE. The Broken Hourglass is a computer roleplaying game with a strong visual relation to late nineties RPG pearls like Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale or Planescape: Torment (who all were based on the Infinity Engine).
Some examples of their articles: Inside the Engine - Introduction to Items, Inside the Engine - Introduction to Sprites, Rules and Mechanics - Group Skills … and there’s a whole lot more when navigating through the links at the bottom of the pages. I kind of soak up such detailed information on game/RPG design as such things are sparsely seeded on the web (you will not see such information leaking from commercial developers!)
In case you missed it Michael of Polygonal Labs has released a package of ActionScript 3.0 data structures that are especially dedicated for game development. He’s also writing examples on how some of the classes are used, for example Queue and Tree.
The hexagon framework will contain similar data structure classes but they will adhere more to interfaces and patterns. Nevertheless I will optimize them for speed as best as I can. In case you are wondering … no, the hexagon framework hasn’t been released yet but I can say now that it won’t take too long anymore until initial release.
While the whole world is hyping Rich Internet Applications, I’m sitting here in my lab and could not bother less! Flex is really neat and who says that it’s only useful for shopping- or flight-ticket booking systems?! Nobody? Good! I’m using Flex to develop my game development Middleware, i.e. editors like the TileSetTool that I’m working on (if I’m not working on the hexagon framework what I’m doing most of the time). When Flex2 was still really fresh I’ve pondered to use Java for this instead but as it turned out, ActionScript 3 is fast enough for most of my desired operations.
So for now this TileSetTool can be used to convert my (custom format) tileset XML files and their belonging tileset image files into combined tsc file which are compressed and saved to disk by the tool (using Zinc). This editor is probably just the first stage to a much more versatile tilemap editor. The tool uses parts of the hexagon framework which also will contain a tile engine to support the tilesets and maps.
It’s fantastic how quick you can knock an application out of the ground with Flex and AS3 while others are still fighting with their IDE.
You can click the image to see a full screenshot of the tool. In case you’re wondering … no, I’m not working on a Flash version of Uridium 2 (would be an idea though). The tileset is only for testing purposes.
Some links to nine articles about the topic on ‘becoming an Independent Game Developer‘, found via Digg. Some more interesting, some less, the last one from a Mac perspective. There seems to be a lot of discussion about if it turns out to be paying off or not etc., in short, things that don’t interest me that much, I’m just creating games because I have fun doing it and I like the practical side, I’m more of a hobbyist! Either way, here are the links …
Introversion
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer.net
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
Zoombapup
BoneBroke
They Came from Hollywood
gusmueller
I’m currently developing a role-playing game in AS3.0 (non-fantasy themed!!) in my spare time. This has been and still is in the design phase since a while and I’m pondering whether to use isometric graphics or an orthogonal view (that has a slight tilt but still is fully orthogonal. If you remember Jagged Alliance you get the idea). Though orthogonal view would make things easier I feel that isometric view gives more visual freedom so I will probably end up with that.
In my book “How to become a Flash Game Developer of World Class” I surely will not forget to mention this useful tool … FreeMind, a Mind Mapping tool that is not only free but also very intuitive! It is written in Java and therefore available for all common Platforms. Where other Mind Mapping tools or even MS Visio fails with being intuitive, FreeMind comes to the rescue!
You can lay out all imaginal hierarchical structures, be it your shopping list, you time plan or the story concept for your next game. After creating a new document with FreeMind, it has one root node. From now on you can add child nodes with the Insert Key, add sibling nodes below with the Enter key or above with Shift+Enter. This way it becomes a breeze to create a large tree structure of your project.
You can assign different color and font styles to your nodes. Another useful feature is the ability to link two nodes together with a bezier line. The tool has a MinMap and a Browse Mode and you can even browse your harddisks file structure with it if you want. You can also link files to nodes.
This is the number one tool I would recommend for brainstorming but it is very useful to lay out projects in more detail as well. There is also a FreeMind Document Reader that has been written with Flash, though I’m not sure if it can be downloaded and used offline.
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