As part of the ongoing Gruden China training program, talented members of the interactive team – Peng, Haixia and Wenjie – are brushing up their Flex & Flash skills. This time around, I decided to move away from the training status quo and proposed a simple Flash game for development.
This initiative turned out to attract some interest from another Grudenite outside the interactive team, as Ronaldo from the tenders team joined the training crew. Equipped only with a basic understanding of game mechanics, a passion for playing games, and the good ol’ FlashDevelop IDE, they came up with a plan of attack.
The game-play concept was simple and addictive; treasures dropping from the sky from varying directions. Each kind of treasure boasts different score points. Some bestows the player with a special ability, some strip it away and causes negative repercussions. The player’s goal is to catch as many treasures as possible to achieve the highest score.
Since the training team will be developing the game from scratch, it’s important that each development phase is managed effectively, broken down into the following stages;
- Main game loop & character motion logic
- Obstacle collision detection
- Sprites and animation
- Item factory & motion logic
This is my first experience of creating a Flash game. The experience of localisation projects really assisted my understanding, but wasn’t comparable with dedicated training. By finishing the training phase 1 and 2, I have learnt that Math and Physics are the basics of any game.
- Peng, Gruden China Office
The graphics assets are sprites from the ultimate platform game, Mario Brothers. Currently the team has completed the first phase of development and the resulting prototypes are playable showcases of character motion. We’ll be blogging their progress and eventually posting the games live on the Gruden blog, so stay tuned for more game development updates the flash training team. To check out some of the phase one demo’s, please click on a name below and use your arrow keys to move the character.
Or, you can view the full page in our training site
July 12th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Nice work…when is the next one coming out?
Btw, if y velocity exceeds the height of a tile, collision detection doesn’t stop mario from falling through the world.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Thanks teeps! We’re still trying to find time to continue it in the midst of production works. As soon as there’s an update I’ll post a new blog post again. Thanks for checking it out
P.S.: yes the collision detection still needs some major work as it’s very simplistic at the moment. I guess it needs some quick math intersection calculation, probably a dumbed-down version of those used in projecting bullet hits in FPS games.