Pixel Perfect Collision Detection in Actionscript 3

Hey guys finally time for another update. Lately progress on my latest game has slowed down a little bit as I’ve transitioned from throw the game together development to simply fine tuning things development. With the extra time I’ve been thinking about some new ideas and finally took a stab at one of them the other night. Unlike my current project — a word puzzle game — this new idea requires real collision detection, and unlike in Fluster where I was content to use simple AABB’s for my objects this time around I’d like to have pixel perfect collision detection. So after some looking searching I came across a great library to accomplish this. Check it out, a demo, and some minor adjustments below the fold.

July 31, 2009 | Filed Under Game Development | Comments

Simplifying Sounds in Actionscript 3

As I’ve been working on my latest game I’ve had to manage a number of sounds. I’ve got background music which must be looped and potentially swapped out for another song in certain situations. I have different effects that I want to be played at different times and usually only one at a time. Finally, I have a slow motion effect that causes the music to slow down or speed up. While implementing I’ve found Adobe’s sound library to be a pain to work with and Andre’s awesome pitch library has some limitations, so I wrote some convenient wrappers which I thought I’d share with you. Check out the source code and a quick example after the fold.

July 24, 2009 | Filed Under Game Development | Comments

Back from vacation, some stuff to share

The title says it all, I just got back from a week off and I wanted to share some really cool stuff I’ve recently come across! The past week I’ve been working hard on my entry for the Word Play contest and am really satisfied with how things have come together. In the process I’ve been looking for a way to change the tempo of sounds in Flash and just came across an awesome demo by Andre Michelle. In an amazingly small amount of code Andre has managed to completely address my needs, thanks Andre! After you’ve finished geeking out with Andre’s demo head over to Lost Garden to read my friend Dan’s thoughts on business models for Flash games. I’ll try to write another post responding to some of Dan’s points but really the article is very insightful and should motivate all of us to try to think harder about how to monetize our games. Anyway, hope you had a great 4th of July!

July 14, 2009 | Filed Under Game Discussion | Comments