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posts tagged with: flash

Dev Log: Platforming Camera

Dev Log: Platforming Camera
Chipping away at things in my remake of my Global Game Jam game. Now that I have more than 48 hours to make the game, I've been taking some time to figure out some things that I've been neglecting for the past couple years of making short form game jam games.

In Offspring Fling, there is very little scrolling. I think only one level actually scrolls both horizontally, and vertically. On top of that there are still only a few levels that scroll at all. This means that I didn't really have to worry about a complex camera, I just have the camera follow the player with a little bit of a drag and it works out mostly fine.

For this new game I'm working on, there's a bit more platforming, and almost every level will have scrolling in it, and there will be some big and open rooms... so I want to have a better camera system in general to handle platforming.

What do I mean by this? Take a look at this breakdown of the camera system from Mario World.



This kind of camera system is pretty crazy. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make sure that the camera is showing the player exactly what they need to see. This is definitely one of those things where if you do it right, nobody will notice you're doing anything at all, but it is incredibly difficult to get this kind of stuff right.
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dev log flashpunk gamedev
Posted February 25th 2013 2:13 PM (Games)
5 Comments

Colliding with Slopes?!

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.
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gamedev flashpunk as3 actionscript
Posted February 20th 2013 10:49 AM (Tutorials)
1 Comment

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:

Image


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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

Game Making 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!
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gamedev flashpunk flashdevelop as3 actionscript
Posted February 13th 2013 11:00 AM (Tools)
2 Comments

Flash Develop Pre-Build Command Line

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:

Image

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.
flashdevelop actionscript gamedev python
Posted February 11th 2013 8:44 AM (Tutorials)
3 Comments

Dev Log: Some Bitmap Text

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

Image

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
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