I’ve made a bit more progress and have added a little green alien which chases after the player, and is currently learning how to climb up walls (trickier than I thought it would be). The alien is more adorable than I was originally going for, but it’ll do for a start.
Next up:
My new project is purposefully a short one. I recently learned about the flixel library for making games in Adobe Flex (it’s like Flash, but just code), and thought it would be a fun way to learn a bit about Flex and Actionscript 3. I haven’t used Actionscript since I played with Flash about 6 years ago, and I definitely like the nature of building Flex applications a lot better than working in Flash. The flixel library is also very cool — it is a super simple library mainly for building platformer type games, although the code is clean enough that people have modified it for a lot of other cool things (a particularly cool example).
My hope is that I can use flixel to build my own platformer in 7 (not necessarily consecutive) days. I’m also counting days where I only spend a short amount of time on the project as half days, since otherwise I’d be too tempted to ignore my real work in favor of playing around with this stuff all the time.
So far I am 1.5 days into the project, and I’ve learned enough of the basics to get my little spaceman hero running around the screen. I wasted more time than necessary trying to get some of the animations to line up properly (the original art is from here, and appears to be public domain, although the IP behind the character is almost certainly copyrighted…). I’m trying to remind myself that if I want to make something remotely playable in 7 days worth of work, then I need to focus on the big features, not whether the player’s plasma rifle jiggles up and down a pixel while running.
Remaining Features:
* someday I’d like to make a non-violent game, but I honestly haven’t figured out how to do that yet
Like any good blogger, it’s been quite a while since I’ve updated here. The reason is that I fell into a common trap for aspiring game developers – I tried building a game that was way too big. Every advice article on game development tells you to make small, simple games like puzzlers or basic arcade games. Unfortunately, when I think about building games, I tend to envision grand scale sandbox worlds full of adventure, so my “small” game was just going to be a open world role playing game with infinite replayability and all sorts of other cool stuff.
I’m also heavily inspired by artwork, so when I saw some cool looking isomorphic style game screen shots, I thought I would try to build a game like that. I actually spent quite a lot of time trying to build a generic turn based combat framework first, but soon discovered that having concrete visuals for my game gave me a lot more motivation. In the end though, the movement on the isometric grid became a pain because I was using a weird coordinate system. I also realized the project was just way too complex to ever get finished, and I didn’t actually have any great ideas about how to make turn based fantasy RPG combat particularly fun.
To make movement simpler, I switched to a top down perspective, and drew some inspiration from the Roguelike variety of games. I read that roguelikes are one of the few types of games where a single developer is capable of producing a full game. This is generally due to the fact that these games use simple ASCII display characters instead of real pixel art, but I ignored that fact and figured I’d see what I could build.
It started out pretty simple, and it helped that I had a nice tileset to start with. It took a bit of work to make the tiles display properly (it automatically figures out where to draw each type of wall), but the result looked quite nice. Next I added a few monsters to walk around (luckily Slick has built-in A* that made this very easy). Then I decided it looked too much like you were walking around through a well lit mall, so I added some lighting… much better! Finally, I added a stats and inventory screen which is actually more or less usable.
I quite like how the game looks as you wander around through dark corridors, but to make this into a full fledged game will still take a lot more work. I started reading up on procedurally generated dungeons, since the idea of building all the game maps myself makes the task even more intimidating. I’ve tried the BSP based dungeon generation technique described here a bit, but haven’t found something I really like yet.
These have been a fun pair of projects, and I’ve learned a ton from both of them. For me, I don’t really build games with a goal of completing them, but instead with the goal of learning some interesting things along the way. It’s a great creative outlet.
But, I am trying to learn one important lesson from all this work — it really is best to try a SMALL game design concept!
So I’m already starting my next project which will take this lesson to heart… perhaps in another six months I will have learned the important lesson of “sticking with a project until you complete it”….
