Phil Peron Flash Platform Developer and Game Development Hobbyist

S’troidz!: Week 0 Update

It’s here! The zeroth weekly update on My Game Experiment! I’ve actually been working on S’troidz! for a few weeks now but I don’t like negative week indexes. That’s just crazy. This update will cover the development I’ve done so far and close with what’s on the table for next week’s build.

First let me tell you quickly why I’ve chosen this format to develop my first game…

I practice a type of Agile development at my “real job” where projects are broken down into sprints, cycles or whatever-you-want-to-call-them and releases are built at the end of each. Requirements drive these cycles and business folks get to choose what they’d like to see next. This empowers them to decide what’s most important and allows developers to show and share their work quickly and efficiently. The beauty is that you have a working “thing” every development period.

Moving on…

After creating what’s essentially a skeleton PushButton Engine project, I lifted some art from the interweb (I’ll totally give it back) and fleshed out the sprite sheets I’d need for the ship avatar and of course, the S’troidz!. The nice thing about using a framework like PBE is that once the project was setup, I only had to write a controller to deal with motion and collision. Input, rendering, spatial logic and other goodies are done for you. I spent about 12 seconds creating missiles in Graphics Gale which gave me all the assets I needed to move around the game screen and shoot stuff.

The next block of development was dedicated to object spawning and collision detection crap. The latter was a pain in the neck. I wrote a class a while back that I wanted to use but it flaked out way too often. Then I tried the PixelPerfectCollisionDetection class but that kept throwing runtime errors due to null object references (and I liked that one too ). Finally, I settled on yet another class that seems to be working well so far. (I haven’t played with Corey O’Neil’s Collision Detection Kit yet but it looks pretty solid.)

By the end of this period I had finished a family of Spawn classes that instantiate game objects based on things like collision detection. This allows me to easily create smaller chunks of S’troidz! when a large one was hit for example.

Now for the final development block where I spent most of my time writing countdown components, text render components and my own version of Dynamic Game Balancing.

The countdown component worked out really well. It’s amazing how handy this is for various game actions. PBE gives you a simple method to call functions in the future but I needed a few more bells and whistles. Once complete I was able to hook up the scoreboard, life counter and bonus point text rendering components. S’troidz! rewards fast play and the combination of countdown and bonus point render components makes it easy for the player to know how they’re doing.

Most recently, the game balancing piece was activated which relieves me of having to pre-package gameplay that accomodates 2 or 3 difficulty levels.

That brings us to today’s demo! Please keep a few things in mind:

• Expect bugs.
• Expect S’troidz! to spawn right on top of your ship killing you instantly.
• Expect it to be either really hard or really easy while I fine tune the balancing.
• Expect a slight delay while the game resources load after pressing the start button. I’m experiencing an old embedded resource issue again.
• No fonts are being embedded so if you see a grey box with no text, click it and the game will begin.

Ok, I’ll shut up.

(NOTE: If you have trouble viewing it below you can view the swf directly here)

If you’ve gotten this far it wasn’t so awful as to push you immediately from the page. That being said, I know it probably wasn’t a blast either. Good, bad or indifferent I’d love to hear your thoughts.

That wraps up week zero. The next dev cycle will focus on the installation of alien crafts and if I have time, implement a period of invulnerability for player ships that respawn after being destroyed.

Thanks so much for visiting. S’troidz! will be back next week!