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Dev Log: Slopes and Slopes

Dev Log: Slopes and Slopes
Still working on the re-make of my Global Game Jam game! The most recent development I can talk about is this:

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Look at those beautiful SLOPES! I haven't actually done any platforming with slopes since all the way back in 2009 when I first made Jottobots (and before that, Verge.) This is my first time doing slopes of any sort in Flashpunk. There were a couple of hurdles to get over to get them working smoothly though.
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dev log gamedev flashpunk
Posted February 18th 2013 12:42 PM (Games)
2 Comments

Dev Log: Some Bitmap Text

I guess I'll start calling these posts Dev Logs now? Yeah, that sounds good.

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The latest thing I've been chipping away at is handling bitmap text in my Flashpunk extended framework thing. There have been a couple of people that have posted Bitmap Font classes but they didn't do what I wanted, and I'm way better at coding my own thing from scratch vs. trying to modify someone else's code to do what I want.

Right now my bitmap text secret technology can do some cool stuff, like three different align modes (left, center, and right) which sounds pretty simple but it actually took me awhile to think of the proper solution for lining up text in a certain way. I also have some colored text as you can see in that awesome screenshot, and the way I do that is pretty cool (I think.) My code for coloring text ends up looking something like this:

//make da bitmap text

var bmpText:BitmapText = new BitmapText("This text will be #1GREEN!!#0 Yeah.", Global.bitmapFont);

//define the color "1" as green

bmpText.defineColor("1", 0x00FF00);

You can see a little bit how it works. I can define colors, which are assigned to certain characters (any Ascii character can be used) and then I can mark colors with a special character like '#'. Text after that character will then be drawn with a tint of that color. It's super easy to do colored words with this system, but it makes some other stuff pretty difficult.

One thing I still haven't figured out is how to escape the special character. Like if I wanted to actually display a '#' in my string, I don't have a way of doing that right now. I wanted to have '##' just escape out to a '#', and I was trying some fancy stuff with regular expressions for awhile but... yeah, things have not worked out yet. This is something I can probably just tackle later though.

Bitmap text comes in handy for a few reasons, and I think I'll make a more detailed blog post about that at some point down the road!
actionscript dev log gamedev flashpunk
Posted February 4th 2013 8:02 AM (Games)
4 Comments

GGJ Game: Screenshot Saturday

GGJ Game: Screenshot Saturday
Still poking away at this Global Game Jam game I started last weekend. If you missed the timelapse, just scroll down a little bit and you'll find it, or just click here. Here's what it's looking like at the moment:

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I'm super excited about that minimap in the upper left hand corner. You have no idea how excited I am. I've been wanting to have a real time minimap in a game for so long but I've always been limited by my programming knowledge or the software that I was using to develop the games, but now I'm finally at the point where putting together that minimap on the HUD only took a few hours of work!

Another thing going on is the crazy blue splashes on the screen, which is actually just me testing my particle system. I don't seem to do particles like most people, and I prefer all my particles to be individual instances or objects in the engine... but this does mean some performance issues unless I have some sort of pooling system set up for at least the bitmapdata being used for each particle. I recently added a new parameter to my particles which is delay, so I can specify how long a particle should wait before it starts doing its thing.

I'm pretty happy with how particle and effects creation works in my latest iteration of my framework that sits on top of Flashpunk. Right now the code for creating those blue particles looks like this:

 //make dem blue rings

KParticle.spawn(level.mouseX, level.mouseY, C.EFFECT_RING, {

	frames: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4],

	lifeSpan: [20, 40],

	delay: [30, 120],

	center: true,

	color: C.COLOR_BLUE,

	scale: [0.5, 1],

	layer: -5

});

Just to clarify a few things, the C.EFFECT_RING is just a reference to a string that I've used to pool the particles ahead of time, so the function here ends up looking for the next particle in the C.EFFECT_RING pool. "C" is just my big static class for all sorts of constants that I want to be able to easily remember.

As far as the yellow and red pixels in the middle of the screen -- those are some helpful markers to show me how my camera system is working. I just got some neat camera blocking stuff working (similar to Jottobots) but it's been so long since I've coded any sort of "advanced" camera stuff that I'm feeling totally rusty and it took me probably two days of thinking to get it working the way I want. I still have some other problems to solve with that, like how to get the camera to properly block around corners, but I'll get to that soon enough. A lot of the inspiration for this comes from games like Super Metroid where the game will hide areas from the player until the player crosses into them, and then the camera will adjust to reveal the new area.

That's it for now! Trying to just post more to my blogosphere in general, so I'm going to just try and post as much as possible for the next few weeks and see how it turns out.
gamedev as3 flashpunk
Posted February 2nd 2013 7:20 PM (Games)
2 Comments

Metroidvania Map Rendering

For the past couple days I've been tinkering around with some stuff in my Global Game Jam game from last weekend. One of the things I'm most stupidly excited about is rendering my game map automagically in code (instead of drawing it by hand.)

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I've added on a bunch of features since the original game jam version of the map rendering system. Right now the coolest stuff is the ability for each room to render its exits, and the potential for rooms that aren't square shaped (some rooms can be L shaped, or whatever)

I think I'm going to try and finish this game before GDC and not get too attached to it. I'm curious to see what kind of systems I can build for a future Metroidvania-esque project... so I have to be careful not to start caring too much about this game, otherwise it will take me way too long to finish. I think it's doable, especially if I aim for just maybe a 2 hour total game play experience! (And I can always add to it later.)
game jam gamedev flashpunk actionscript
Posted February 1st 2013 2:47 AM (Games)
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2012 JayisGames Awards

2012 JayisGames Awards
A few weeks ago Offspring Fling was nominated for an award over on JayisGames.com for best indie platformer of 2012. I didn't really think much of it since there was some pretty fierce competition in the category, but the other day I woke up to an email congratulating me on my win!
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Well fancy that! I don't really know how this happened, but in the end all that matters is that I have a fancy gold coin internet image to display to everyone in the world. Thanks to everyone that voted for Offspring Fling!
offspring fling yay! good times
Posted January 30th 2013 4:11 AM (Games)
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Holiday Bundles and Deals!

Holiday Bundles and Deals!
Just a quick heads up! I've been posting about this like mad on Twitter but then I realized that my Twitter widget on my site is still broken...

Offspring Fling is currently available on Indie Royale with a bunch of other cool games. It's a pay what you want bundle but there is a minimum on how much you pay. The minimum increases when someone purchases the bundle at the minimum, and it decreases when the bundle is purchased for more than the minimum. Getting the Indie Royale bundle also grabs you a copy of Namiko, which is a game jam game I made just over a year ago now. I polished up the game quite a bit and now it's a fully playable deal! It's only available through the current Indie Royale bundle, so get movin' if you want it!

At the time of me writing this there is only ONE DAY LEFT! to get the bundle. Sorry for the late notice! But if you want Offspring Fling and a bunch of other cool games for a low low price then you have to act now!

In other news, Snapshot is now available from the Humble Indie Bundle! There is some time left in this bundle to get Snapshot, Closure, Shank 2, and a bunch of other rad games.

Last but not least, Offspring Fling is just $3.99 right now on Steam.

I think that's about everything... have a good holiday season!
offspring fling snapshot namiko
Posted December 23rd 2012 11:42 AM (Games)
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