Create-ivity

It’s been a while since my last update, but that’s because I’ve been busy. Aural Fighter is moving along nicely, even now that school has started I managed to continue development at a steady pace. Behold, the main menu (including flying aircraft for decoration):

I’ve also been working on the collision system a bit - I’m rolling my own routines rather than the standard movieclip hittest functions, because all I need are some basic rectangle-rectangle tests. No real problems here: I’ve done it before and I did it again, everything’s working fine. So, I can now blow up some enemies or blow myself up by crashing into them. Fun!

However, I started running into some performance issues. Nothing bad, it seems it was most troublesome on my own system, but the game just wasn’t playing 100% smooth. After some research I found another approach at rendering the game: using BitmapData objects as surfaces instead of movieclips for everything. It’s a bit more low-level, but much more how I’m used to work with 2D, so I quickly wrote a small rendering framework around it. It works like a charm. Too bad there’s no neat way to compare the performance, but at least it feels a bit smoother now. It runs fine on the other systems I tested it on, too, so I guess it won’t be a problem.

I’ll soon move into the art phase: large parts of the logic are done and dealt with, except for a few menu’s and the weapon selection system, so after that, it’s creating tiles, levels, enemies and scripting enemy waves. Yay! :)