rapid prototyping of games using flash
Welcome to the fifth part of Making Games in ActionScript 3 using FlashDevelop.
Wow, when I got started on this whole tutorial thing I never expected it’d take four parts just to get to the enter-frame part. But here we are.
This post will be about making stuff move. But before that we’ll need a quick primer on Events. They is one of the mainstays of actionscript, especially version 3.
This is the third part of Making Games in ActionScript 3 using FlashDevelop.
Last time we got our first enemy on the stage. Now we’ll take a quick look at embedding other formats into your classes. Grab the gnome here to the right and put him in your assets folder.
Check out the competition results over at gamepoetry. There was tons of impressive entries, second place winner Dungeon Romp is really neat, it manages to tap into the latent rpg grinder inside of me. But I can’t help but feel the bytes spent on the 3D-walls might have been better spent on maybe items or something, since all I use to get around is the map. It’s nevertheless a great game!
Other entries I enjoyed are:
This is the third part of Making Games in ActionScript 3 using FlashDevelop.
Okay kids. Lots of boring setup stuff in the first two parts. It’s time to get some graphics in the mix!
As a side note, since we’re using what’s called the mxmlc compiler everything I do in this tutorial can be done using whatever IDE you please as long as it uses that compiler, if you’re really into this whole command line thing you don’t even need the IDE.
So, here it is, the full 4089 bytes of it, a-steroids4k for the gamepoetry 4k flash game compo.
I’ve been wanting to remake an old retro game with new mechanics for some time now but I’ve never had an idea I though worthwhile, there’s way too many half assed remakes out there and it’s hard to beat really innovative ones like 1D tetris or some crazy space invaders version. This is my take on asteroids. I played the original on the proper hardware a few weeks ago and was amazed by two things; The XY-vector screen is *really* bright and it’s hard. Very hard.
So I wanted to juxtapose the underpowered feel and make the player way more powerful, this is a bit tricky without making the game far too easy. The easyness wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but to feel really powerful you need to have a baseline of “weakness” to contrast against.
The basic mechanics came to me on a train ride, luckily I had my trusty laptop near and could churn out some quick proof of concept code then and there. It was only later the 4k competition was announced. I’ve done a game for a 5k compo in the past and enjoyed it immensely, the result of this was lost in a hdd crash and is unfortunately not available anymore. When I started slimming down the game was at about 29k. I ripped out all the sound and got down to 18k (yes, the sounds were tiny). I’d love to post screenshots, but, honestly the game has looked more or less the same ever since it’s conception. Ever since then it’s been a lot of aggressive cutting and small amounts of putting back in.
The full source code is under the MIT License, but a word of warning is in place, this is essentially obfuscated code seeing that I needed to shave of some extra bytes to get the text in there. I also put it up on wonderfl for your fiddling pleasure. I bet there’s a good 20% of savings in there that I just missed, I’ll be thrilled by any modifications to it!
You have arrived at the second part of Making Games in ActionScript 3 using FlashDevelop.
Last time we got stuff setup. Not all that amusing really, just a tiny bit more setting up to go before we can get some stuff on the screen.
Recent Comments
I'm picking up AS3 from learning C++, and I don't really understand what's going on with [Embed(source='../../assets/gardengnome.png')] private static const GfxGnome:Class; Is ...
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what the fuck? it wont let me save the leek the I'm Alive message doesnt work either! im completely new to this ...
I like that one of your level screenshots appears to be a phallic shape, hah.