Here’s a game I made for this Newgrounds contest. It’s an endurance game where you’re trying to escape some mean aliens in a rocket ship, but you will fail. Please give it a shot though and let me know what you think in the comments (or if you’re a Newgrounds member, please rate/review it here). Click the image below to open the game in a lightbox.

Play it at Newgrounds.

I had been prototyping 4 or 5 game designs over the past several months and during that time I hacked out the core code blocks that eventually made it into TLE. The game itself took me about two weeks of off-on work, with the last few days being pretty intense to meet the deadline. I built it using the Flixel framework.

There is absolutely nothing original about this game. It is not going to win awards, though if I won that contest I would be super-stoked. I mean, you fly a rocket ship and dodge asteroids and alien gunfire. That’s it. Remember SkiFree for Windows 3.1? It’s like that, but in space. I didn’t mean for that to happen, it just did. Coincidently, I hated SkiFree as much as I hate TLE.

NOTE: I am aware of the slowdowns. I upgraded Flixel to the latest version at the last minute due to some unforeseen requirements and it’s been bad since then. I’ll look into it when I’ve had more sleep.

This will be my first publicly released game and as such it is totally conservative with nothing original about it. It’s a simple endurance game, where you have to escape alien attacks and evade celestial objects (chances are, you won’t make it).

Developers who are registered at FlashGameLicense and have at least 1 game released may log in and view the game. Please leave some feedback! Thank you!
I’m submitting it to Newgrounds this weekend to participate in their Flixel contest (just in time).

And yes, it runs perfectly fine. I’ve run it at 60+ FPS with 7,000 particles, but that actually isn’t the limitation (unless your particles are crunching heavy math for eg movement). Rather it’s the size and number of sprites that we’re colliding with the particles. Click the image below to pop a lightbox with the demo:

To squeeze all the juice out of Flash I employed a couple tricks. The first was the particles themselves–they’re blitted to a single bitmap which is used as the source image for grabbing collision data from. The particles are also drawn with the raster engine in Flash (multiple setPixel32() ops to give the illusion of a line… a choppy one anyway) instead of the vector renderer (lineTo()). The second trick was to only grab a Vector of pixels from the regions we cared about (within sprite boundaries) every so often, then to loop through the Vector and test it against our desired conditions. Also, since the particle bitmap is more sparse than our sprites as far as opaque pixels go, we test the particle bitmap first, resulting in a lot fewer passes on the first round of conditional statements.

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When I set out to write a very simple Pixel Bender (PB) kernel/script thingy, I expected it to be relatively straight-forward, mostly because Adobe has been so good writing quality documentation for its products and/or there is a wealth of info on their products produced by their users. Unfortunately I didn’t find the dev guide in the Help menu and I missed some key AS3 bits from the links I’ll post below, but even so I still had a lot of trouble finding some info that really should already have been out on the interwebs. So this post is to fill in the gaps when going from AS3 to Pixel Bender.
Hope it helps

Best resources for beginners

Here’s the best tutorials and explanations I’ve found so far:

• The official guide and reference. Slap that F1 key! Also, don’t forget the Help menu in the toolkit like I did (there’s the PB-specific language spec and dev guide there).
• Using PB as a calculator. Completes the official tutorial.
• Great in-depth article with general+performance tips.
• Very straight-forward examples + comedy. Can’t go wrong there.
• Nice user article on optimizations and some speed tests (turns out, for input bitmapData beats ByteArray beats Vector.)

Syntax overview

As a casual programmer of high-level languages and no mid- to low-level ones, I was thrown off by PB’s awkward syntax. It’s strongly typed, which is fine, except I’m not familiar with low-level languages like C or any previous shader language (PB is based on GLSL from what I hear). Here’s a basic difference:

AS3: var i:Number = 12;
…in PB is: float i = 12.0;
The decimal in 12.0 tells PB it’s a floating point number. If it was just 12 PB would think it’s an int.

When dealing with “vectors” (which are arrays, as in Flash 10’s odd use of the word “vector”) it’s float2 i = float2(12.0, 2.0). Notice there’s no brackets or anything suggesting any type of array present. It’s simply the type + how big the array is, eg float3. It goes up to 4, for the 4 channels in images: Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). Then, as you can see, intializing the array is a simple matter of putting in the numbers you said would be there. So float4(1.0, 24.2, 0.1, 3.4) is valid whereas float2(1.0, 24.2, 2) is not, because there’s an extra number in there and it’s an int (adding insult to injury).

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Makin’ games

I’ve been working on a couple game concepts and want to prototype a few more before committing to one to build out. I’ve been hacking the hell out of Flixel, which I’ve decided to use for a most of the games. There’s a screenshot of game3 on the right there. Weird, eh? Also fugly, but it’s placeholder art so there. I have a new collision detection system for it that I’ll be posting about eventually (at least, I’ve never heard of it before).

The microtransaction (MTX) dilemma

I’m really excited about all the new services that have been released to allow Flash developers to monetize their games through microtransactions. I fucking hate ads, plus the ROI of them in Flash games is usually shit. Many many years ago I knew microtransactions (MTX) were the future of digital content and I’m pleased to see the idea coming to the mainstream (in America at least, Asia was quicker on it as usual).

The problem I’m seeing with MTX is that Flash developers need to try a lot harder by making much bigger games in order to really reap the rewards. Before, you could make a pretty simple, fun and addictive game and monetize it easily with ads. But with MTX, you can’t do that as easily since you need to build more content for players to buy into. For example, to me, putting premium content in a Tower Defense game isn’t viable–the game concept is so small that I doubt anyone is going to pay anything for more turrets or maps (for example). There just isn’t enough game there.

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What I wanted was a fast, seamless way to transition from clickable thumbnail on a zui canvas while dynamically loading the content of whatever the thumbnail represented. I just loved the idea of loading content while zooming into a thumbnail without loading a higher-res image to take its place, then having the pixelated thumbnail disintegrate to reveal the actual content that got loaded during the transition. Anyway, it was the best idea that I could come up with for my application, so here we are.

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I’ve been messing around with particles, particularly the blitted, traily kind I guess. Click on the image below to pop and watch it. Grab the source at the bottom and let me know if you do something cool with it.

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Recently I’ve had the need to scale a dynamic text field which was fed by XML. Readability after scaling was not important, but it did have to look good (it’s for a full Flash site). However, scaling the MovieClip that the text field was in would cause some pretty chaotic behavior with the text — the text would try to scale with its parent but in doing so would shift around spastically until the parent MC settled into a new scale. This was unacceptable.

A quick google didn’t yield anything relevant, so I was left to my own devices. I remembered being able to draw pixels to a BitmapData object while writing my game in order to improve performance, so I figured I’d see if I could just copy the pixels from the text field and “bake” it into a bitmap.

Turns out you can. In fact, Adobe had already done this in the help files and it’s actually extremely easy. Check it out:

var tf:TextField = new TextField();
tf.text = "bitmap text";
var myBitmapData:BitmapData = new BitmapData(80, 20);
myBitmapData.draw(tf);
var bmp:Bitmap = new Bitmap(myBitmapData);
this.addChild(bmp);

No sweat right? Anyway, since I didn’t find any help on this anywhere else (granted, I didn’t look very hard), I thought I’d share this little adventure of mine. Hope it’s helpful.