Zombie Starlings

While I might have been able to do more with this game had I used the Alein's Zombie game engine as my starting point, I decided to give the Starling framework a shot so spent a good chunk of time porting my existing code over to Starling. Actually this is probably not a big waste as I am going to be using this code as part of my Game Jam library that I am developing for use in future game jam competitions.

One of the reasons that I have decided to experiment with the Starling framework is simply that it is the sister-framework to the native iOS Sparrow framework. My thought is that I can do my prototyping in Starling as I am still fairly productive in ActionScript. If it proves to be too inefficient,  the option of going native is much easier as the frameworks are similar enough to make the porting of code very quick.

The map rendering was greatly modified when porting my old map code over. The old way I handled the map was to simply create a large sprite made up of tiles and simply moved this larger sprite around to scroll the map. While I am sure this technique could be used for Starling, the larger-scale games I am working on will require really large maps. As the size of these maps could exceed Flashes size limits, I opted to go with a slightly different technique.

I create a large sprite that holds just enough tiles to be one tile larger than the screen will hold. The tiles are set to the map tiles that correspond the top-left corner of the screen. Every time the map is scrolled to the point where one of the edges of the viewport sprite is visible then the map is repositioned and a new set of textures are assigned to the tile. This allows for smooth scrolling while not having to worry about size restrictions. It also requires a lot fewer sprites to be created which helps with memory and speed.