Now that Shade is finished it’s time for me to start thinking about what to work on next. After cutting my teeth on Java using the fabulous Slick game engine I think I’m ready for something new. (I’ll be sure to share my thoughts about Java and game development in the future, though.) So after looking at a few options I settled on Flash for the time being, and after a long weekend of hacking I’d like to share my first flash game with you. Consider it my “hello world” for flash gamed development! Play the game and here some more after the fold.
Click to play. It’s Asteroids :-) and no you won’t lose if your health bar is empty…
So, here are some thoughts on flash as a Java game developer. In rapid form:
- Flash as a language is pretty awful
- It’s a scripting language, like Javascript, but is trying to add strong typing, like Java
- This means it looks awful
- I write my actionscript (3.0) in Vim, there’s a debugger at least…
- The Flash CS4 IDE kind of sucks for anything other than animating
- But, but flash is really good for animating things
- You can even put scripts in frames!
- Meaning that you get a lot of nice things done for free
- The trick is mapping your model from, say, Slick to flash
And that last one is the biggie. I’m still working on it in fact but I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The good news is that you can map a lot of your old ways to flash. You’ll just have to grok some of the way flash does things. Towards that end I’m going to distribute the source code for the game above, so if you’re interested in getting started with flash games take a look. Probably the most interesting thing is the crash package. Guess what, I ported my Crash library to flash!
- Download Asteroids source
As always let me know what you think. Are the parts of the game you like? Did you find the code useful? Anyway, I’m looking forward to learning me and sharing it with you!
Hello, my name is Alex Schearer. I grew up in New York and currently live in Seattle.
5 Comments
I like your work, really :D I’m trying to put together with Flex and Action Script 3.x that is a really Object Oriented languages? I’ll see!
I’m watching your code, soon a little review :P
What about scrolling in flash ? :P
Hey Gornova I appreciate the feedback! Yea Flash is strange especially for Java developers but it’s kind of cool once you grok it. As for scrolling that will hopefully be in my next game! Let me know if you’d like to hear more about how to do something like that.
Hey Alex, I couldn’t find a way to contact you directly on here so I thought I’d comment. Here is the video of my game I was talking about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvqZheG8tBM
And the site for my game is:
http://hufsoft.com/xplore
Good luck and have fun with flash!
Idea: what do you think about port come key features (gamestates, input, graphics/scrolling) on flash ?
For input you already have something built in using the event system to track key presses and releases. As for game states I’m not sure quite yet how to map that concept over, but I imagine you could do something w/ symbols. Finally, for scrolling I think it will work the same was as in any other game. You just need to set all bodies not contained in the viewport to be invisible.