Beginning Project 1

Project 1 has been very interesting so far. Much of it is because I can't make up my mind of what I want to do. Part of me really wants to do a cool physics platformer, with grappling hooks and levels and all sorts of cool stuff, while the other half wants to do a strategy game, like Advance Wars. Yet a another half could be up for doing a mini-game compilation; I did one back in high school and it was lots of fun to make.

This is what I have so far though:

This one is pretty basic. The block can jump (on release of the spacebar) onto each of the platforms. Also, it can move left and right with the arrow keys, and it even comes with fancy physics/friction. Working through this gives me great respect for the guys behind Mario Bros. (Especially 3, which had momentum I think). They are able to produce a fun, responsive game. Meanwhile, mine feels a little loose, and doesn't nearly have the perfect controls (especially in the air). The next step for me is to have the character bounce off the walls of the platforms, as now it can go straight through them. Other things that would be good to do as well would be scrolling, having actual graphics, and being able to fall through platforms (with like down and jump).

While playing around with the window size, I thought it might be fun to have a game where dragging the actual window resizer would be the control for the game. But what is a test render in Flash is not an online browser. The browser really chugs.

Better Look at Above File

This second test was trying to get legs act for themselves. It took much longer than I expected it to, and it's still kind of clunky. For whatever reason it doesn't always work (I think it has to do with the speed the character is coming down). All he can do is jump. if you hold down spacebar he prepares, and launches when you let go. Some of the problems are that the legs separate, and it doesn't always register a landing by bending the legs (as described above). Originally I was going to put two feet in (the long, vertical box at the bottom), but it really made flash chug-a-lug. Like really bad. I was surprised...my code must be too clunky! As well, the code isn't too versatile. The legs will only work when the thigh and calf beginning and ends are directly above each other. One of the reasons I wanted to do this was so that my character could animate himself, and be able to stand on sloped ledges, and respond to the environment.

Better Look at Above File

After all of this though, I need to get cracking. This is all cool and whatnot, but how useful to an actual game? I think the latter especially is more for fancy sake rather than solid gameplay. This coming up week I need to pick a project and go with it! Even if it's a bunch of boxes (which would be bad, since I always do that), as long as it's a solid, moderately fun game I'll be happy).

Oh, and I did make a loading screen/intro screen for the first file, but I forgot to publish it that way. Sorry! And both of these files allow double, triple, quadrupile...jumping. Good for getting back to the platforms in the first one and good for breaking the second!