Create-ivity

I promised to write about that ‘other game’. It’s a school project focussed on AI. Me and a friend are writing a turn-based strategy game similar to Advanced Wars, and some other friends are writing AI applications that can connect to our game. We’ve chosen for a Flash-based front-end, connected with a Neko-based back-end that handles the connections with the other AI apps. From there, it’s simply watching those AI agents duke it out against each other.

As for Aural Fighter, it’s slowly becoming better and more playable. I haven’t done much on it last week due to being ill, but I’ve done some things nonetheless. Most of the missile weapons are now working: the guided missiles and splash damage missiles are pretty fun to play with and they’re quite powerfull. I’ll tweak the exact values once I can playtest some of the later levels, but for now, it’s fun to blow up waves of enemies with splash damage missiles.

The first level is nearing completion, too. I only need to do some art for it and add several more enemy waves. I’m also working on the first endboss, which is going to be component-based. I’ll probably write some more on that in a later post.

Something has bugged me for quite a while: Aural Fighter reacted slower and slower the longer I played it. I was absolutely sure it had to do with the rendering code, but even a bare-bone test game slowed down after a while. Confused, I ignored the issue for a while, but I realized I couldn’t release Aural Fighter with such an issue unresolved, so I just had to fix it.

But whatever I tried, nothing seemed to cause the problem. Finally, I decided to create a minimum piece of code that still reproduced the problem, to post on the HaXe mailing list. While doing so, I found out that the game only stopped respondeding after a lot of keypress events had happened, not just after some time. I was confused: was I handling input in a wrong way? It should be a perfectly normal method… but while stripping away unrelevant code, I finally figured it out: I had added another keyListener in a pre-loader frame, one that was never removed afterwards. This one started to intervene with the other keyListener. Removing it finally solved the problem.

On a side-note, I’ve added shadows to all enemy fighters and I’ve drawn a few new enemies and tiles. I’m also working on another game - as a school project - so Aural Fighter is proceeding slower as desired, but the experience I gain from that project should be pretty usefull for later games. I’ll write some more about that project later.

Level 1, but now with updated art. It’s still not really final - the large trees could use some work, the jungle borders are still somewhat flat and the water is too obviously tiling - but it’s definitely moving in the right direction. It took me quite some work to make sure the enemies were sticking out enough from the background. I’m using more saturated and bright colors for them, while I try to keep the background darker and less saturated. It surely takes some testing to get right.

So, that’s what I’m working on now, and the more I do it, the more I get the hang of it. Pixeling is fun and with my in-game editor in a usable state, creating these levels is actually quite enjoyable. Let’s hope it shows in the final product!

It’s time for another progress update about Aural Fighter. Though college is taking quite some time these days, I’m trying to spend as much time as possible on this game. This week, I’ve started work on an in-game level editor and I’ve drawn some enemy fighters and made a Python script that allows me to easily create new enemy types by simply editing a text file. This data is converted into HaXe code, so while it’s easy to modify some values, it’s also compiled as code, which means it doesn’t need to be parsed at run-time.

I’m thinking about doing different sets of enemies, each with a distinct style. This screenshot shows some of the first set I’ve been working on. It’s all still early work, but comments are welcome.

The problems

After I had thrown away Flash CS3 and started to work with HaXe, I found myself in a somewhat spartan situation. Manually linking art resources by handcrafting a xml document isn’t exactly the most fascinating or fool-proof part of game-development. Notepad++, the text editor I’m using, offers syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages and has tabbed browsing and can display function lists, but that’s where it ends, too. I don’t have auto-completion, compile buttons and visual settings interfaces, and so on.

Also, I’m spending a lot of time on school these days, so where possible, I want portable solutions. I want to be able to plug my USB stick into just about any computer and start developing right away.

The solutions

So far, I’ve found a few helpfull tools. One of these is LetMeType. Basically, it monitors what you type, and offers suggestions based on what you’ve typed before. It’s pretty customizable and provides a nice auto-suggestion ‘feature’.

Continue reading Improving your toolset…