Bacon and Games

Tag: flixel (page 1 of 2)

OK, so the title needs work.

This is a game I was prototyping a few years ago, back when I was playing around with Flixel. It was inspired by a Ludum Dare game done by Adam Saltsman (creator of Flixel) called Grave Robbers as well as Super Crate Box. There’s also a dash of Lemmings in here, but rather than idiot-proofing the world you’re “controlling” the cute, fuzzy animals as well as elements within the level in hopes of getting them into the right buckets.

As each level progresses, different traps come online meaning you always have to keep an eye out for new things looking to off your critters. It plays a little goofily with the mouse but the concept was originally intended for a touch interface.

This game, as well as Collect Coins. Don’t Die. (from One Game a Week), touches on a this idea I keep coming back to… this idea that rather than moving through a game that gets progressively more difficult you’d stay put in an ever-changing, evolving room. I will probably do something with it on a larger scale some day, but it’s fun to see a piece of that larger concept in these quick protos.

Not shown in this video is the ability to feed each animal their respective food (e.g. carrots -> bunny) to get them to wait a few seconds while they eat. You could also combine like animals by jumping one onto another.

This is an old prototype I built in Flixel that I didn’t end up pursuing. It resurfaced recently as the seed of an idea for Week 1 of my One Game a Week challenge. It’s a concept I believe that if fully explored could be a lot of fun. I might revisit this idea one day but for now it’s more than served its purpose as a vehicle for exploring both Flixel and Unity.

Animal Sorter – Update #2

Here’s a quick teaser of the progress I made this weekend and a quick summary of the stuff that’s changed:

  • removed the springboards, clicking on an animal now makes it jump
  • added food (drop food to temporarily stop animals) – only carrots for bunnies is shown. Eventually these will be in limited supply. Mechanism for placing food not implemented yet
  • warning icons for impending traps
  • added furnaces – these will eventually open and become traps that you’ll have to keep the animals from walking into
  • added saw blades – not deadly yet, but they will be
  • added mines – jump on to kill them, otherwise if an animal walks into one it’ll blow them to pieces
  • added some new placeholder art (warp pipes, simple poof animations for item droppin, sorting bin icons, etc) – just to clean the look up a bit

There’s still quite a bit to do, but I’m extremely pleased with how it’s progressing after only 3 partial days of development. I’m really getting excited about the idea of this on an iPad with touch controls… that could be REALLY fun but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Prototype first, then I’ll worry about release platforms. More to come soon, I promise.

Code Name “Animal Sorter”

I had a chat recently with Ajay Karat about building games inspired BY art, rather than designing a game and then dressing it up with art. He sent me a bunch of his concept art to dig through and this is the one that stood out to me. (Not sure what that says about me…)

This movie requires Flash Player 9

I could really imagine those dudes bouncing around in a game and, much like Happy Tree Friends, I kept thinking how much fun it’d be to kill something so darn cute. The concept I landed on takes place in a classic arcade format where the animals drop in from the top and bounce their way to the bottom. Your goal is to sort them into the 4 different openings at the bottom of the screen.

Get them in the right bin, horray! Get them in the wrong bin and… well let’s just say the sorters don’t take kindly to receiving the wrong fuzzy animal. The 5th gap, at the bottom center, will eventually be fire or lava or something equally nasty though the level isn’t close to being designed yet.

You can’t control the animals directly, rather there are different “gadgets” spread around the level that you can click on to modify the paths of the animals. Right now all I’ve got is conveyor belts, trap doors, warp tunnels and springboards but I have many more in store for this game. Anyway, not bad for a Friday’s work. I’m excited to see where this one goes. I meant for my boxy, pixelated versions of Ajay’s characters to be placeholder but I’ve kinda fallen in love with them :)

Here’s the first sketch…

Flixel Forums Fmod and Protos

OK, the F in “Fmod” is superfluous, but I like alliteration. So sue sme. Waka waka waka.

Adam Atomic recently put out a call for volunteers to help moderate the Flixel Forums and I was happy to lend a hand. Flixel has lowered the barrier of entry for a lot of budding (and seasoned) game developers and so stomping on the throats of spammers seemed like a worthwhile cause.

Mmmm, SpammyEven though I’m pretty much just tasked with spam patrol, it didn’t seem right to be a mod on a forum without knowing too much about its focus (at least not from the technical perspective). I’m a long-time contributing member of actionscript.org and thought it’d be nice to be able to contribute to Flixel education in the same way I have to general AS education. (That’s AS education, with one S)

So in the spirit of learning Flixel, I’ve decided to add to my ever-growing pile of prototypes a game loosely inspired by Super Crate Box and other single-screen twitchy platformers. Right now it’s in very early stages (all art is 100% placeholder 1) but so far it involves catching coins and stomping on ninja stars before they eat up the ground and drop you into the searing hot lava below. It’s a game about postponing your own inevitable demise whilst being as greedy as possible. Hooray, take that priorities! Here’s a screenshot:

Mmmm, jumpy

I’m amazed by how easy Flixel is to pick up and how simple it is to implement a lot of really powerful things. With some creative thinking you can do quite a lot without writing very much custom code at all. Many thanks to Adam “Atomic” Saltsman for sharing his framework and for allowing me to lend a hand in keeping it going. The Flixel project above is aimed at helping me extend my contributions beyond, “Can I spam you?” -> “No, no you may not.”

Re: “ever-growing pile of prototypes”
I’m a fan of all sorts of games, but on mobile I tend to gravitate towards word and puzzle games. As a result I’ve been working on a few concepts of my own. Here are some screens from other games I’ve got in varying stages of development.

Holy crap, ship something!

Looking at all the works-in-progress I’ve got (and this is just some of it) the phrase “Holy crap, ship something!” comes to mind. I think it’s time I pick a pony and put a bet in play. Back to it!

  1. background borrowed from DemonSpawnn purely for experimentation
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