I learned more than I produced this week. This wasn’t by choice. I had planned for a lot more. What started as a leisure session to create some explosions (among many other things) ended up being a complete rewiring of nearly half of the classes that make up S’troidz!
This week’s update is bittersweet. I added some cool stuff but had to dump dynamic game balancing. (It’s not you, it’s me) Deep down I knew it wouldn’t last. I just didn’t think I’d be killing it so soon. It’s still something I’d like to work on some day but for now, I’ll be rocking a more linear approach. It’s easier to test and much easier to change. Onward!
I’m posting this as a reminder to myself and as a beacon of hope to others who need to embed a font in ActionScript 3 and build using Ant. It took me forever to find a solution (shown in step 3).
The documention didn’t provide enough information. What I’d like is a chart similar to what they have in the livedocs for mxmlc options but whatever… at least the source code was included. The answers always live there.
Welcome to the week of aliens. Well, one alien actually. I’ve already written the movement for four of them but a nasty (unrelated) bug with one of my components and a half-baked integration plan made the beginning of this week’s development a bit muddy. The good news is that I came away with a better understanding of how things should be structured and when that magical day of refactoring comes around (probably next week), I’ll be ready. Without further ado, here’s the change log for S’troidz! r1:
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.
To really kick off My Game Experiment it’s probably a good idea to come clean with what the heck I’m really building. Saying it’s “an Asteroids-style shooter with a few tweaks” isn’t saying much at all so let me to present some details.
About a month and a half ago, I downloaded PushButton Engine. My primary reason for doing so was the same as it’s always been when checking out a new piece of game technology… curiosity. I’ve been a gamer for over 30 years and a curious one for probably 29½. My approach to game development in the past has always been this: I see something cool in a game and wonder how it works. I snoop around until I find a solution. Then I write a paltry little demo that proves I understand how it works. It’s like loving magic with a passion, buying a magic kit, figuring out how all the tricks work and then never performing. That’s basically been my routine. Until now.
PushButton Engine is an open-source Flash game engine from PushButton Labs, a group led by two of the Garage Games co-founders.
The plan behind PBE is to give away the engine source, sell a visual editor to help rapidly create games, offer a storefront for developers to sell their own PBE components and finally, make games themselves. Currently, the only thing available is the engine source and the ability to create (but not yet sell) PBE components.
With the arrival of online gambling, massively multiplayer games and services like XBox Live come a much larger audience and a widening demographic scope. These players have helped turn the game industry into a money-making behemoth. As large and popular as this industry has become it has done a surprisingly poor job of addressing the darker side of gaming. Protecting Games by Steven Davis of IT GlobalSecure attempts to solve this problem by shining a light on piracy, cheating, account theft, privacy, protecting children online and more.
