Banner Design of 6 Themes
Six themes selected for different on-screen scenes: lakeshore, underwater space, snowy scene, forest, starry sky with clouds, and mountains.
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Killing Machine Comes
Obviously, because of the unpractical level design, the method of monster AI I finally found out makes the last level become a living hell. The maze is too simple and 4 monsters occupy the main paths of the map.
Method: A* Pathfinding （http://www.policyalmanac.org/games/aStarTutorial.htm）
Disadvantage: Too sensitive and keep hunting down the object
Matrix
Get stuck with the Pack Man…
Ase7en advised me using matrix to remap the level and to change it to a tile based game.
Only find two kinds of completed source code online and one of them is in JavaScript.
I should not spend that much time on 3D animation and preparing for exams…
Character functions, including normal operation and limited superpower, are totally fine.
Matrix is done and the game now is totally tile based with invisible blocks.
The issue is the AI of monsters.
Used he method from the reference but the monster didn’t work in that way.
Used tween to drive one monster temporarily but its move was too mechanical and weird.
Background image need to be changed.
Didn’t sleep for 3 nights.
Want some ice to make me high…
3rd Level Arkanoid
Finally I can start to do coding on designed materials…
The 3rd level is arkanoid. It is not hard for me. The key point of such classical game is the level design, which can use the simplest operation to created the funnest thing. I used the same game status from previous levels. And in the major part of the level, there are not only bricks and movable paddle in the limited space, but also fixed paddles as barriers and a key to activate win panel. Most elements can be re-scaled or replaced , so the level design can be changed all the time to get the best effect.
Monsters are random read
Debug
A lot of writing work need to be done. So this week I focus on the debugging for the previous finished 2 levels.
In the first level, a very obvious bug is the “suddenly disappeared floor”. It doesn’t happen very often but has really bad influence on user experience. Just imagine that when you are so interested in controlling the character move or jump forward and getting succeeded in escaping traps and killing machines one by one, then your character falls through the floor in a sudden and never shows again without reason, will you be madden immediately? I wasted over 2 hours on finding the reason of the bug. It was very strange that all the codes are correct and totally logical without error. Then I find there is another layer of teeth covered by the current one, which led to overlapped calculation and made things very weird.
In the second level the bug is based on the mistake in replay function. I put the command to reset the value of gravity to 0.1 in “play” mode to have the problem fixed.
In the Main.as, I removed the function “_sceneID = 1” from function “onShowStart”, so user can continue their current level.
Second Level On
Aha. That’s the design I got for the second level: 800*600 image part-bitmap part-ai. So I still have to start programming on tiles and stick man.
The scene size is 800*3000, and the content of game can be seen as a vertical version of level1. Because the character will keep falling down during the whole gameplay, I changed the number of gravity to a very small one in doer to make the experience not too creepy. Moving barriers are also driven by the customized tool just like the moving platform in level1. But I also used another function to make the barriers variable on appearance (random stop). The codes below is for the auto-move to the key at the last(bottom) of the level.
The functions of menu and buttons are also created on temporary materials because the design is not finished yet. I created a loader in Main.as to load each panel and game level. This function is partly influenced by current Scene ID.
Btw, I didn’t see any animated duration. Are they still there?
Game Making Tools and GreenSock
Thanks for Ase7en’s advice and 9RIA’s awesome classes, finally I witnessed my character jumped on to a moving stage and stood stably on it .
The first thing I was informed to download is the engine called Greensock (http://www.greensock.com/)， which can be useful to deal with some animation effects in the flash game. The second thing I was given is a package of game making tools collected and integrated by 9RIA, which helped me to animate the blue platform moving up and down within a limit with random speed, visualize the life system and realize other important functions in the game.
According to Ase7en’s suggestion, I created to new variables to get the current x,y location of the character and used for loops to update the value of y to have the function of standing on moving platform realized.
Up to now, most functions of the 1st level have been realized. What I need to do next is to import the level design and move functions from tiles and stick man to real design.
However, I got stuck at the last step because the design is only a 800*600 ai image, while the width of the level is 3000 px. Another problem is the floor design. some teeth are just too sharp that make the character walking on it looks very strange.
Original design
Stick man
Loading Me into Standard AS3 Programming
After learnt the basic knowledge of standard customized-class programming method with the cases of loading bar, heartbeat, hitBoard and beingMan, I came up with a new thought for the project programming structure. In our previous plan, we are going to create each level separately and publish them into individual swf files, and then use another flash file as a loader to contain these things. No I realized all this works can be done within only one flash file. What I need to do is just to create every level and panel in separated movieclips. In this way, elements can be well integrated, which is good to avoid bugs and errors.
In this week’s meeting, we have tasks assigned. Because of the following 2-week Easter holiday, I was asked to have the first level worked out. For this level, I have already found the way to realize character movement, camera, enemy, and life status. The only problem left the the moving platform. I suppose tofind more reference and to ask Ase7en (my lecturer in 9RIA) for advice as well.
In today’s class, I used flash builder to create a scientific caculator and optimized the hitBoard game with rewarding system and random appearance.
Zarcs Logbook 