I've already written about the semi-conductor project and how I've written some Flash animations/applications for it. Of course, I'm more interested in making fun stuff´, so I decided to put my knowledge to good use and write a small game to see how difficult/awkward Flash actually is.

To sum it up, it is somewhat awkward, at least if you use the IDE itself. FlashDevelop still is as nice as ever, but you can quickly develop games nonetheless. I prefer Torque Game Builder though in retrospect.

Before I continue talking about the development itself, let's take a look at the actual game. Sploidz was the first game I wrote using Torque Game Builder for Joshua Dallman, and since I still had all the assets in my subversion repository, it was an easy decision to try and port this game. If you want to play it, you can download it for free here.
I haven't ported everything: I've just rewritten the main characteristic features that make up Sploidz's code in ActionScript.

Without further ado´ here is the game:

Click to open Sploidz in its own window

Because the art is still copyrighted and I haven't heard back from Joshua yet ´, I decided to create a free version that only uses "coder art" - in this hand-drawn coder art

Some´ have said that this version looks cuter, decide for yourself:

Click to open SploidzCC in its own window

Below you'll find a description of the development and at least one helpful trick and most importantly a link to the source code of the "copyright-free" version.

Because the orginal version is way too difficult to be really fun, I actually sat down one more time and added code to make the platform slower if you're in danger of losing (up to 3 times slower):

Click to open SploidzMoreFun in its own window

Development

I think I spent less than 20 hours on the project. It's hard to say because I worked on it on three different days, but only probably less than 6 hours on each.

The main problems during the development were:

• How do I get the art assets into Flash?
• How do I use the IDE and objects in a way that is helpful?

Lessons learned:

Even though the project isn't that big, it didn't take long for annoying bugs to appear - mainly in the matching code, because it's somewhat asynchronous and you have to make sure that an item doesn't get removed between events, etc.
So again, I can only say that assertions and lots of debug messages are your friend and are really useful for understanding the sometimes mysterious ways of non-obvious code interaction.

Again one of the biggest headache was how to make the game a game (so you don't always and feel some reward while playing) and this resulted in implementing the platform game element from the original Sploidz game, although I wanted to avoid that in the beginning because of the added complexity.
Someone´ pointed out though, that if you have 8 columns and only 5 different item types, the main idea of matching items becomes trivial. It's obvious, but I didn't think of it while coding the proof of concept code.
Of course you have to somewhat tune the speed and animation durations of everything to make it playable. I think the game is really hard at the moment, but that's better than too easy and I especially added the "survival timer" in the upper right panel to allow for some competition and personal best times.
I might change the platform code at some point to be more player-friendly, but I have more pressing projects to do at the moment: my Bachelor Thesis... /o\.
As said above, I actually sat down and added a time scaler to the platform. The code is quite simple but helps the game a bit (I managed to survive 2 minutes and it was more challenging and less depressing to play the game ^ ^). The code is quite simple:

public function getPlatformTimeScale():Number {
	var maxRow:int = 0;
	for ( var column:int = 0 ; column < Grid.numColumns ; column++ ) {
		var firstEmptyRow:int = grid.getFirstEmptyCellRow( column );
		if ( firstEmptyRow > maxRow ) {
			maxRow = firstEmptyRow;
		}
	}

	const minScale:Number = 1.0;
	const maxScale:Number = 3.0;
	var scale:Number = minScale + (maxScale - minScale) * Math.pow( maxRow / (Grid.numRows - 1), 8 );
	trace( "Using platform scale: " + scale );
	return scale;
}

As you see, it uses a power function to make the platform slower only if really few empty rows are left.

Interesting things to know

• If you want to important a sequence of images (say you have an animation stored as picture frames diamond_black00.png to diamond_black15.png, only select the first image when "importing to stage" in Flash, otherwise you won't get the dialog asking you whether you want to import an image sequence as animation.
  (Cost me a few hours of searching to find this out.)
• If you have animations that stores multiple frames in one image, you'll have to split the images up into the respective frames. To do this in Photoshop make use of "guides" and slicing and notice the "Slices from Guides" button that is offered. It's really helpful.
  You can also store the creation of the guides and the slicing as action/macro and reuse it which also saves some time.
• If you ever get the error "type was not defined or was not a compile-time constant", you might have a symbol instance that has the same name and class name. Flash freaks out for some reason and displays this weird error message.

For added fanciness, I've also included two older builds that show the evolution of the game code.

Note: There are bugs in these builds, so they are really just meant to show the progress on the first and second day.

Click to open Sploidz0810 in its own window

Click to open Sploidz0813 in its own window

Fun note: I implemented most of the fancy features (combo matches, the score bubbles, the platform) today in a few hours (a lot less than expected). I think ActionScript is an okay language, although it lacks quite a few comfort features of regular modern programming languages (function overloading, delegate types that actually check parameter type).

Last but not least here is the link to the code: FlashySploidz Source
I release the code itself under GPL and the art under Common Creative.

Over and out,
Andreas

Today I've decided to work on BSS again - finally.

And I've even come up with a few neat bullet points to help me clean-up the codebase and I really feel like sharing them with the world today (although everybody can come up with them in a few minutes, too, but hey - now I can say that you've only copied my thoughts ):

How to fix and clean-up stuff quickly:

What do I want?

• remove unnecessary code
• clean-up the design
• untangle tight couplings

How do I do that???

Hack & Polish

• look at a specific code section
• rewrite it quickly while keeping the behavior the same
• don't look at the overall design concepts - to KISS (to keep it simple STUPID)
• as soon as the new code actually seems to work, go and polish it slightly (to make it readable again)

Repeat these steps a few times..

Now look at the "overall picture" and try to identify common patterns and remove duplicate code again by writing generic helper code - but this time keep it decoupled and make it less messy!

Rinse and repeat...

OK... sounds great? Yes, it does! And it even works to some degree. I've tried it this evening and although I - like always - lose too much time browsing around and getting lost in the WWW, I still made some progress.

Here's my worklog as proof (and to annoy Joshua a bit ;-P):

Enough for today. One more Dexter episode for me now (actually the first today) and then good night!

Good night,
Black

I've finally found enough time to write a few things about Shelled and put up a general Shelled info page and one describing my memories of its development. So if you're interested you can take a look at it and tell me how you like them respectively how you like the game.
By the way its totally free and you can download the  game source and mod it, too, so if you haven't tried it out, do now!

On other news I've been working on this and that and my GarageGames project still isn't finished as I'm waiting for some artwork and I've been playing around with Doom 3 and Quake 4 (respectively their SDKs), maybe I'll post a few screenshots in a few weeks. I'm still in a trial-and-error phase but I know what I want to do, so hopefully I'll be able to create something nice.
There are also a few other projects and tasks that keep me busy: mostly school at the moment and preparing for my A-levels - though I've only started last week with that -, the second round of a computer science competition and other stuff.

Anyway stay tuned for more info soon.

Black

A lot has happened in the past weeks and I still can't believe it. But first things first:

For the second time I take part in Germany's federal computer science contest (for students): It's called "Bundeswettbewerb Informatik" and consists of 5 problems(respectively 6 for teens aged under 16) which have to be solved in about two months' time. Everything has been written, tested, coded in about 4 days (2 days in my fall vacation and 2 days on the last weekend before submission date). The code isn't beautiful:

• It's meant to be short, so it won't waste too many pages when printed out.
• It's meant to be simply and make use of libraries, so the documentation can be kept short and to the point (no need to explain sorting when STL already does it)
• It was hacked together in only 4 days with the last 2 days being spent in semi-crunch mode putting together as much as possible in as little time as feasible.

The documentation isn't very good either, for the aforementioned reasons and I wrote all ~14 pages in 2 days, so there wasn't much time to correct and proofread, but anyway you can download my submission here.

(BTW if you happen to be a corrector for BWINF and specifically happen to be mine, please note that I always exaggerate and am pessimistic, and my submission is pretty good after and I've taken it very seriously *nervous laughter*)

If it wasn't for my job application at Splash Damage, of which I unexpectedly heard back four days before the final submission date of the contest, I would quite possibly not have taken the time to finish 4 problems in total, write some lousy documentation for them and send them off, but the motivation boost that the reply from SD gave me (or rather the prospect of it) was simply incredible. Now the answer to my application is a whole different story and I'll tell it some other time.

On some other news Shelled! has finally been released Tuesday night and I've been playing it like mad online and people seem to enjoy it, too. I guess we can call it an success, even though there are still some minor bugs in the release build. But Joshua, the owner, founder - and my honorable master -please don't lock me again in the coding room - of Red Thumb Games found a job/internship at GarageGames and has been busy since, so he decided to release (me and)  the current version of Shelled! for free instead of waiting another month or two until some kind of copy protection had been built in by us. 

Here's a screenshot:

It looks neat, doesn't it?
Download it from http://www.shelledgame.com and give it a try!

I'll try to write a post-mortem soon and add it to my project page, but right now I'm busy with some contract work I got from GarageGames (thanks Joshua!) and I have already spent enough valuable time writing up this post.

So stay tuned and watch out for the fish,
 Andreas

Finally after 8 months of hard but fun work Sploidz is done and has been released by Red Thumb Games. I was the lead (and only) programmer for that project (David House did code the prototype, however) and I'm so proud to see it released and played by you!

Here check out this screen:

Weee, exciting, isn't it?

If you want to find out more about the project, don't forget to check it out in the project area or download it directly from http://www.sploidz.com.

Enjoy the game,

Andreas