New Project: 7 Day Platformer

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:

• Randomly generated or handmade maps
• Shooting*
• Voracious aliens

* someday I’d like to make a non-violent game, but I honestly haven’t figured out how to do that yet