2013 - 4 - 23 / 4:00 pm / tutorials

FlashDevelop to iPad Workflow

I recently got one of them new fangled iPad things and I heard on the internet that Adobe AIR is actually pretty decent at building things for iOS. Offspring Fling used Adobe AIR so I'm already a little familiar with how to build for Windows and Mac, but it turns out that iOS is an entirely different beast... sort of. The set up and configuration of the whole workflow can be a nightmare, but once it's over then you'll have a set up that lets you push F5 to build right to your device!

Follow along on this series of text and images and hopefully you will be enjoying pushing the F5 key on your keyboard and seeing an app pop up on your iOS device! Also put on some relaxing music because some parts of this tutorial might be hard to understand and frustrating. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit for this. read more

2013 - 3 - 13 / 3:46 pm / tutorials

Adobe AIR Window Scaling

Over the past week I added some menus and options to my Global Game Jam game remake. I'm doing this super early on in the game's life because having some awesome polished menus makes it feel like a "real" game, which motivates me to work on it more. One of the first things I did for the game options was window scaling. The game natively runs at 320 x 240, so obviously players are going to want some various scaling options unless they really want to run it at 1x and barely see the game on their screens that are now probably 4000 pixels wide.

The awesome thing about working in AIR is that it will automagically resize the game's window to the size of the flash stage, so all I have to do is set the stage width and the stage height and the window will resize to match. However, there are some funky issues that can arise.

The flash stage has different scaling modes that you can use. There's EXACT_FIT, NO_BORDER, NO_SCALE, and SHOW_ALL. For the case of this game, I'm using EXACT_FIT after I resize the window. The reason for this is so that players with super huge monitor set ups can scale the window themselves.

This was actually a problem with Offspring Fling until the lastest update. I had a player that had a desktop width of over 4000 pixels because of their multimonitor set up. They couldn't play in fullscreen mode because it would scale across both monitors, and they couldn't play in windowed mode because it was too tiny. Changing the window mode to EXACT_FIT made it so anyone can scale the window to whatever size they want. I could've also used SHOW_ALL, which would maintain the game's aspect ratio as it scaled, but some users wanted to stretch the game to fill their entire monitor. (WHY?!) read more

2013 - 3 - 11 / 2:27 pm / tools

Flashpunk NineSlice Class (Updated!)

Last week I posted a quick NineSlice class that I wrote to work in Flashpunk. It was a little clunky, so this past week I cleaned it up and integrated it with Flashpunk's graphic system. The new version now extends Image, so you get all the awesome Image effects like color tinting, rotation, scaling, and more. Check out the new version!

NineSlice.as

As a quick example, here's how I'm using it in my current project. Check out this screenshot of a menu:


Thanks to the handy dandy nine slice object, most of this menu is just drawn with a couple of simple source images. I scaled them up 4x so you could see them a little better.


Just using these images as sources means I don't have to make a new image every time I want to change the size of one of the widgets. I can also do some cool animations with tweening the width and heights of the panels over time.

Feel free to use the NineSlice.as class however you want. If you use it or improve it in anyway, let me know!

2013 - 3 - 6 / 2:14 pm / general

A Flashpunk 9-Slice Object

As I've been working on this Global Game Jam game remake, I've been trying to come up with solutions for problems that I can hopefully reuse for more projects in the future. One of the things I've been thinking a lot about is managing and drawing the various user interfaces for the game. Even though I'm not quite sure how much UI stuff this game will need, I wanted to have some sort of solid base to start with so that I could get stuff up and running quickly.

One of the most basic core structures of drawing a cool UI (in my opinion!) is a 9-slice graphic object. What's a 9-slice graphic object?! Well, here's a quick example of one that I have working in Flashpunk right now.


The box that is being drawn above the red player rectangle is a working example of my NineSlice class. It's being drawn from a source image of nine tiles. The source file has four tiles for the corners, four tiles for the sides, and one tile for the center. Here's what the source looks like (blown up 4x because it is tiny.)


This is incredibly useful because it's now possible for me to draw stylized boxes for potential UI components at any size without having to draw each one individually. One thing that I wish that I had spent more time on in Offspring Fling is the UI for the menus, so in the future I want to make my menus and interfaces as awesome as they can be, and having some functions do a lot of the fancy work for me is a big step in that direction. Here's what it looks like right now: NineSlice.as

Here are some snippets of code from the example shown above:

//initial set up

private var nineSliceTest:NineSlice = new NineSlice(Assets.IMG_NINE_SLICE_TEST, 3, 3, 3, 3);

//in the entity's constructor

nineSliceTest.scrollX = nineSliceTest.scrollY = 0;

nineSliceTest.width = 40;

nineSliceTest.height = 40;

nineSliceTest.x = 50;

nineSliceTest.y = 50;

//in the entity's render function

nineSliceTest.render();

Right now this is a very rough first pass on this kind of thing. Ideally it would be some sort of Flashpunk graphic extension that would plug directly into the Flashpunk rendering system. For now it makes use of the Flashpunk Draw class, and some utility functions that I've written for myself. Feel free to use it or improve it, and if you end up improving it then let me know!

2013 - 2 - 20 / 10:49 am / tutorials

Colliding with Slopes?!

In my last blog post I talked a little bit about how I've implemented slopes in my latest project, but I only talked about how I was actually importing them from Ogmo Editor into Flashpunk and not about how I'm actually using them for platforming. In this post I'll attempt to explain how I actually use slopes in my movement system, which means my platformer characters can walk up and down them without any problems.

The first thing to keep in mind is that all of my slope code only really works with slopes that increase or decrease by 1 pixel. I could rework some of it to make it work with a step of any size that the programmer could define, but for now 1 step is all I really need.

Pixel Sweepin'
The first thing to know is how I actually go about moving my platformer characters, and other moving objects around my game world. I use a method that I refer to as pixel sweeping. Basically whenever an object moves in my games, I move it one pixel at a time and check for collisions at each step! This might sound a little crazy to some folk, but this is the most reliable way I've been able to do stuff like platforming and other moving objects and still collide with even the tiniest pixel of a floor or wall. I've been using this technique since the very beginning of Bonesaw: The Game. read more

2013 - 2 - 13 / 11:00 am / tools

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! read more