I’m working on a board game and to help design the board I created a level editor. It’ll save me a ton of time while designing the board, not having to hand-write the board, but since we intend to reuse the engine this editor is going to save me a ton of time in the long run. Some of the features include:
The colored spaces of course have more meaning in the game itself. The orange spaces, for example, launch a mini game.
Here’s a quick teaser of the progress I made this weekend and a quick summary of the stuff that’s changed:
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.
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…)
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…
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.
Even 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:
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.
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!
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