It is a very nice game – albeit a bit on the short side: it took me about 5 hours to finish it. But this is the only negative bit I can think of. Everything else about the game is very nice. It is very polished and it’s a charm to play. You have to think about the puzzles for some time but the learning curve is okay and there were no unfair bits.

The game is black-and-white only (with shades of gray) and you play a boy that apparently got lost in a forest (that is how it starts) and you want to get out.

The game mechanics are very simple: you can only move around, jump and hold on to things to drag them around (or press buttons, etc). In this regard the game is very similar to Another World (another very good game worth playing).
The puzzles are all phyiscs-based and because of this the aforementioned fairness is achieved: sometimes you just have to think a bit longer how to solve a puzzle but it is always logical.

The game is somewhat violent because it works using the “learning by dying” principle and if you don’t enable the gore filter, you’ll see the poor boy being halved, stabbed, squashed,… many times. However, since he is only a black shape, it’s okay and won’t put you off playing. The game uses many (and only) auto-saves to track your progress and you never feel punished for dying because you’ll get another try straightaway without having to replay more than a few seconds.
“learning by dying” works really well (and is also used in Another World): You don’t have to worry about a “health bar” or rewind time or…

The difficulty of the game is just right and it gets harder as you progress through the world: you get to use more objects to solve the puzzles or will have to think of new ways to use physics to achieve your goals. However, one annoying bit is that also autosave points get moved further apart even when there is no need for it. This only happens in the last few “chapters” of the game though.

All in all it is very much a game worth playing and a very polished experience – kudos to the developers!

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

Check out the trailers:

If you’re interested in some additional thoughts, please continue and read on:

First I have to say that I love the trailers and really really can’t wait to see more. I always wanted to see a game that takes on the Le-Parcour concept and transforms it into fun gameplay – see one of my GID entries, that sadly wasn’t finished, or games like N for example.

What exactly characterizes this Le-Parcour feeling? For me it’s movement-centered fast-paced gameplay that rewards you with fluent animations and a feeling that you flow through the level in one progressive move.

From the games I’ve played the Prince of Persia series (beginning with Sands of Time) has managed to convey this feeling quite well. Particularly the escape scenes from the Dahaka are excellent:

Mirror’s Edge reminds me a bit of a mix of Oni (because of the hand-to-hand combat) and Prince of Persia, although it still appears to be very different.

One of the things I like is that it has no HUD whatsoever (or at least a very limited one to avoid motion sickness), which really helps immersion and this minimalistic feature goes hand in hand with the very clean design of the city (look at their choice of colors) and creates a setting that can only be described as stylish.

I think, it’s an important point to make the players feel like they’re playing a work of art and thus try to play it that way: trying to find elegant ways through the level, not brute-force ones.

The city conveys this, too. To return to the choice of colors: notice how everything is held mainly in white and all other colors are full, saturated and warm ones. They are also used in a clear and concise way. There is no mixing of them or gradients. It really sets forth the mood of the game in that part of it.

The use of the ‘Runner vision’ as visual hint is also very non-intrusive and stylized, too. It again fits the general design style.
Though I have to say, that I don’t think that those hints are sufficient as visual cues. I’d get totally lost in the level of the last trailer (if it’s not entirely linear and there is only way to traverse the level because you also gotta have dead-ends then – this is probably true for the roof-top level, too) and it’s pretty frustrating if you reach one, since it breaks the flow of the game.

I’d guess adding some arrows, that fade in, would certainly help it, but I’m curious how they are going to fix that anyhow.

Another problem I really wonder about is: what happens if things go wrong?

Nothing’s worse than making one wrong move or time a key press badly and suddenly you have to load your last savegame or quicksave and replay the last 3 minutes, because you have forgotten to save. Especially when it comes to arcade games or platformers that only allow checkpoints, they tend to suffer from this a lot, because it’s not really fun to replay the same parts of level over and over again, even if you agree, that it’s probably just your fault for having two left hands.

The main feature that helped Prince of Persia against becoming terribly annoying was the time rewind power of his dagger – that is: you can rewind the last ten seconds and begin again with whatever you were doing from there on). Mirror’s Edge could suffer from the issue, if they don’t add something similar. Imagine dying, because you didn’t rebalance Faith – that’s the main protagonist in the game BTW - correctly while walking over a bar. Now you gotta wait a few seconds for the game to reload an old save point and start anew.
This totally breaks the flow of the game. All motions and actions are stopped and you’re forced to wait. You lose control and that’s bad.

They really need to tackle that issue and I’m curious, how it’s going to be solved in Mirror’s Edge.

They also have to fix the sounds. The current moaning of Faith now and then gets on your nerves after a short time, too – just listen to the trailer again and imagine hearing that sound every minute for a few hours. It’s a pretty scary prospect, isn’t it?

That said, Mirror’s Edge is one of the games that I’ll try to watch actively for new developments and press releases, because it certainly could become a really fun and entertaining game that brings some fresh ideas to the first-person genre.

Cheers,
Black