Thanks goes out to everyone who gave me feedback on my last experiment! It’s always fun to share things with you guys and hear what you think. Since I posted that experiment I’ve been hard at work on another word game — which I will hopefully be able to share with you soon. Enough about that though, what I really wanted to show you today was another experiment of mine. Once again I’ve been thinking about alternative styles or mediums.
Prototype for Stenciling
Try clicking to add more bouncing balls…
Basically I wanted to see what it would look like if I used the game object as a stencil for a larger static texture. Traditionally you attach the sprite/texture to the game object and move the two in sync. This approach required separating things and using a mask to reveal the desired part of the larger texture. There are a couple reasons why I’m interested in this.
- It encourages using cool textures such as fabric textures
- It leads to a cool visual effect which is something like animation
- It is cheaper to do than real animation
- It doesn’t require as sophisticated art skills as real animation
- It seems distinct to me/I don’t know of any games that use it
Anyhow, I think it is pretty neat! There is one problem however. Flash only allows you to apply a single mask to an object meaning that for each ball on screen there is one copy of that larger texture. So I’m not sure Actionscript is a good platform for this type of style. It is also somewhat complicated to connect the static textures and dynamic game objects. I ended up doing something quite hackish. I think with some more work you could probably find a better, novel solution. Perhaps drawing each “stencil” to a shared mask on a single texture?
As always I hope you found this interesting and let me know if you have any thoughts!
Hello, my name is Alex Schearer. I grew up in New York and currently live in Seattle.
2 Comments
Cool idea, but different object have different backgrounds?
Cool idea, but different object have different backgrounds?