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posts dated from: february 2013
Game Making Tools
Since I posted the time lapse video of me making a game for Global Game Jam 2013, I got a couple of questions regarding the exact tools I'm using for my game making needs. This is a pretty long post, so I'm going to put it all behind the jump tag. If you want to know my secrets, then click read more!
Flash Develop Pre-Build Command Line
Last week I posted an asset generator script that will go through the contents of a folder and spit out an Actionscript class with static embeds for all of the assets. It's been pretty useful so far in my current project, but then I found a nifty feature of FlashDevelop that made it even better! Using FlashDevelop's Pre-Build Command Line option, I'm able to automatically execute my assetGenerator.py script every time I build my game, which means I don't even have to manually execute the script whenever I add content.
To hook it up in your project, just go to Project, then Properties in FlashDevelop. You should get a window with a couple of tabs across the top. Select the "Build" tab and you'll get something that looks like this:
In that screenshot I've already added the command to run the script every time I build. The first part of the line is c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe which just calls up the command prompt in Windows. The next part is the /C which is a flag that is set on cmd.exe which roughly translates to "run the following command, then terminate." The last part is $(ProjectDir)/assetGenerator.py which is basically just telling cmd.exe to run that command. $(ProjectDir) is actually a special string that FlashDevelop recognizes, and will replace with the full path to the project. In my case I had to surround the command with quotes due to having a space in the full path.
I also checked the "Always Execute" checkbox... not really sure what that means, but as far as I know I want assetGenerator.py to be run every time I hit build, so I want that checked.
Right now this makes adding level content to my game even easier. Now whenever the game builds, the assetGenerator.py will reassemble my Assets.as class, and then my "Universe" class which manages the entire game world will look at everything in my Assets class with the prefix "LEVEL_" and assemble the interconnected game world out of everything embedded with that prefix.
I absolutely hate any sort of tedious work, like adding content to a game by hand and copying pasting the same line 100 times and modifying each line slightly... so if I can spend a few hours coming up with methods to spare me of those tasks then it's totally worth it in the end.
To hook it up in your project, just go to Project, then Properties in FlashDevelop. You should get a window with a couple of tabs across the top. Select the "Build" tab and you'll get something that looks like this:
In that screenshot I've already added the command to run the script every time I build. The first part of the line is c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe which just calls up the command prompt in Windows. The next part is the /C which is a flag that is set on cmd.exe which roughly translates to "run the following command, then terminate." The last part is $(ProjectDir)/assetGenerator.py which is basically just telling cmd.exe to run that command. $(ProjectDir) is actually a special string that FlashDevelop recognizes, and will replace with the full path to the project. In my case I had to surround the command with quotes due to having a space in the full path.
I also checked the "Always Execute" checkbox... not really sure what that means, but as far as I know I want assetGenerator.py to be run every time I hit build, so I want that checked.
Right now this makes adding level content to my game even easier. Now whenever the game builds, the assetGenerator.py will reassemble my Assets.as class, and then my "Universe" class which manages the entire game world will look at everything in my Assets class with the prefix "LEVEL_" and assemble the interconnected game world out of everything embedded with that prefix.
I absolutely hate any sort of tedious work, like adding content to a game by hand and copying pasting the same line 100 times and modifying each line slightly... so if I can spend a few hours coming up with methods to spare me of those tasks then it's totally worth it in the end.
Twitter API 1.1: User Timeline to PHP
Sometime in the past few months Twitter updated their API to make super simple tasks like fetching a user timeline pretty difficult. I started looking into the changes to see how to fix my code on my various sites but every time I started to get into I would just get frustrated and give up. So finally I attacked the new API again and this time I was able to get all the way to the finish line.
In order to fully remember what I did, and maybe even help some people out, here's a (relatively) quick guide on how to fetch a user timeline and get the data into a php script in order to spit out on your website however you want.
In order to fully remember what I did, and maybe even help some people out, here's a (relatively) quick guide on how to fetch a user timeline and get the data into a php script in order to spit out on your website however you want.
Asset Class Generator for Actionscript 3
The Reason
As I set forth to try and jam out the rest of this metroidvania game before GDC 2013, I've been trying to think of ways to make content generation as fast as possible. One of the big hurdles that I run into with AS3 when making a lot of content is constantly having to embed assets into the code. FlashDevelop makes this incredibly easy though. Right click a file, click generate embed, and there you go. However this still takes a lot of time when I'm talking about a game that is going to have nearly a hundred level files and who knows how many image assets, and I'm constantly switching assets around.
After a quick consultation with Twitter I got a crash course on Python and spent a couple hours making assetGenerator.py.
Download!
Download assetGenerator.py 1.0, along with an example project right here. You can also just view the code. All the files in the example project are blank files just to use as an example, and keep the download size tiny. Here's an example of the code it spits out. If you want to know more, then read the rest of the post!
