Porting Deadly Dodge Ball

I have been slowly moving away from Flash towards HTML 5 for a while with 12 Months of Doomsday most likely being my last Flash project. It is certainly possible that Flash CS6 will somehow convince me to keep developing for Flash, but Adobe has pissed me off quite a bit the last few months so CS6 would have to have extremely impressive features (or a really cheap upgrade from CS5.5) in order to keep me as a customer. For this reason I decided to port my Friday the 13th project from Flash to HTML 5. If porting from Flash to HTML 5 wasn't enough, I thought it would also be a good opportunity to play around with EaselJS, which is a Flash-like animation library for JavaScript.

The reason I thought about using a third-party (open source) library instead of cleaning up and building on top of my own is simply due to the fact that going forward I am going to have less time to spend on my site as I am going to be focused on developing some mobile games. By using a third-party library, I don't have to worry about the low level graphics code and can focus my limited time creating games. There are a lot of choices available, but I decided to go with EaselJS because it is similar to Flash and is being used by a couple of other projects so it has some chance to stay around.

EaselJS is not vector based, but instead relies on image strips. Flash has a feature that lets you export an animation as a series of image files so I used this feature to create the fireball. This left me with a large number of files that had to be combined into an image strip. Sure, it is possible to load the images by hand into a paint program and assemble the image strip but there must be a tool that does this. A quick search for such a tool lead me to Texture Packer. While this is a paid tool, it does have a free version that simply restricts you to the more essential features. This provides enough capability to create image strips for games. As I happen to write a development blog, the author of the tool was kind enough to give me a key for the full version. With that disclaimer out of the way, I do suggest that if you need to take a number of individual frames of animation and turn them into an image strip that you take a look at this tool.

With the movie clip converted into an image strip it was fairly easy to move the code over to JavaScript.  The big difference was that the stage does not automatically update itself but requires you call an update function. This is not that huge of a deal as there is a built-in timer class that lets you call a tick function which can be used to call the stage update function. Of course, you also have to remember to change getTimer() into Ticker.getTime() and a few other minor differences, but overall the library feels enough like Flash that it was not too difficult to transition to. It is certainly a library that I will be playing around with in the future.

For those of you interested in either of these tools, EaselJS is located at EaselJS.com and Texture Packer is located at www.texturepacker.com.

TMoD Twelve Months of Doomsday

What better day then Friday the Thirteenth to resurrect my Game Development blog. After all, Jason managed to rise from the dead quite frequently. True, a month between posts isn't exactly dying but I had to have a Friday the 13th reference. For 2012 I am planning on updating this blog every other week. To be a bit more precise, weeks that do not have new content on BlazingGames.com will be the weeks that I post articles here. When appropriate, these articles will provide details about whatever was posted on BlazingGames the previous week. If for some reason you want to read more of what I have to say, feel free to follow me on Google+.

The big game series that I am running throughout 2012 is Twelve Months of Doomsday (TMoD) which is my way of having fun with the 2012 end of the world theme. Statistically speaking, there is a small chance that the world will end in 2012. To my understanding, the end of the Mayan calendar didn't actually represent the end of the world but the beginning of a new cycle. Perhaps the 21st of December will be the beginning of the singularity that many science-fiction writers are predicting.

TMoD is a collection of classic-style arcade games tied to a twelve part over-arching story about how the cast from One of those Weeks try to prevent the end of the world. I actually enjoyed bringing back the characters from my 46 episode adventure game. The design of this series not only had to tell a story, but had to fit in arcade games similar to those I played as a child. All the games I write are my original code and I try to make the games as original as possible while still bringing back the feel of the old days (well, at least if you are 30+).

The first game in this series was actually chosen not because it was an arcade game but because it was one of the first games I ever typed into my Commodore 64. Lunar Lander was a text based game found in a book containing 101 BASIC Computer Games. While BASIC was not the greatest of languages, it came with the computer so it was the language of choice for learning to program back then. I probably still harbour some bad programming habits as a result. The game gave you a distance from the surface and you had to type in the amount of fuel you wanted to burn. This determined your speed as you approached the surface. There were a number of arcade versions of this concept which I modeled my game after.

You will notice that a large portion of the games deal with threats from space. This is partly because the main villain is an alien, but more because the childhood arcade games that I played tended to have science-fiction themes. There are a lot of really good games that I am planning on releasing as part of this series so please give the series a chance if you find you don't like the first few games.

Thirteen Spikes Unlimited 1.0

Thirteen Spikes Unlimited is now finished and has been on the Blazing Games site since Friday the 13th. As I have mentioned before, there was some plans to port the game over to HTML 5. ActionScript and JavaScript are very close as they are both variations of ECMAScript. This makes the game logic very quick to port, even if JavaScript does not have as nice of class or variable support as ActionScript. The other thing that ActionScript has that JavaScript lacks is the Flash library. Because Flash was created as a streaming vector animation system, this library is greatly tied to graphics and animation. The HTML 5 Canvas simply does not have these classes, but there would be very little stopping someone from writing them. In fact, to implement Thirteen Spikes Unlimited, only a small subset of the class library would be needed.

This would require a bit more time than I have, so the port to HTML 5 didn't happen and instead themes, campaigns, and sound were added to finish off the 1.0 version. This does not mean that the next Friday the 13th won't have a HTML 5 version of this game. That would be May of 2011, so depending what is happening with my current projects (one which may be doomed) this might be an interesting project. So, while Thirteen Spikes is finished for now, it may resurface in the future.

.8 Unlimited Spikes

My Thirteen Spikes Unlimited (TSU) game has reached the age of 0.8 which means that it is getting close to be complete. This release adds a construction set. Any levels you create in the construction set are saved using "Flash Cookies" but I haven't figured out a way of transferring the levels. I am honestly thinking that the only way sharable levels will be doable will be to create an air version of TSU. Version 1.0 will allow selectable skins, have multiple campaigns that the player can choose from, and the high score will be campaign dependent. If anybody has other ideas for features, email me and I will consider them.

In other news, Google has released their Go programming language. It is still in very early stages but seems interesting. Of course, there is an obscure programming language named Go already, so the name may be temporary. Go2 is not likely as the goto statement is considered to be evil by language purists as programs that make extensive use of that statement are messy and resulted in the term spaghetti code.

March has spikes too

It has been a month since the last time I had the chance to post an entry to the Blog. Since that time I have finished posting all 13 parts of the Thirteen Days of Releases on Blazing Games. For those of you who haven't checked out Blazing Games lately, these releases consist of Day 5 of One of those Weeks (all 6 episodes that make up the day being releases as Open Source and the making of chapters for those 6 episodes being released) as well as the campaign mode version of Thirteen Spikes Unlimited.

The next Friday the Thirteenth is quite a while away and will feature a construction set. I will probably do another 13 days of releases that month as well with Day 6 of One of those Weeks being the other 12 releases. This plan is not set in stone and if things continue to be as hectic for me as they have been then this may not happen. It is just sad that so much of the things that are stealing my time are not money making ventures.

I am going to try to get back to posting an entry here at least once a week but can not make any guarantees.

Friday February 13, 2009

I have posted the Blazing Games game for tomorrow. While Mary Caton did send me some potential themes for thirteen spikes, I did not have time to incorporate them into the game so there is only one skin in the 0.4 build of the game. It is, however, animated and rather interesting. That being said, next month also has a Friday the Thirteenth. I will probably add more skins in addition to the campaign mode for the next release of Thirteen Spikes Unlimited that will happen 28 days from now.

February plans

After examining the calendar trying to figure out what exactly my plans are, I realized that my current release plans means that I do not have to worry about starting on Episode 3 of Dozen Days of Words until the end of the month. The third episode of Dozen Days of Words will not be released until the end of March due to some special plans that I have for the first thirteen days of March. While I will not go into details about what exactly I had planned to do, in case I am forced to change my plans, I will say that it will involve thirteen days worth of releases.

Work on next week's release is well underway. The next version of Thirteen Spikes Unlimited has a skin feature for which I have developed a rather interesting theme. I kind of want to have more than one new skin for the game but don't think that I will for version 0.4. With that said, there is always version 0.6, 0.8 and 1.0 so by the time this project is finished next year (remember I am only releasing builds on Friday the 13th) there should be a variety of skins.

Thirteen Spikes and the Flex decision

One of the nice things about this year's site format is the simple fact that most of the posting work for the weekly update is done on the first post of each month. This means that posting Thirteen Spikes Unlimited, which has just been posted, doesn't take too long. This is a good thing as this is one of the rare occasions when I was taken out for supper so I was late posting the site today. Because everything was ready to go, however, it only took minutes when I got home to post the update for this week.

While I know that you should never drink and blog, I am going to make an exception today as I do want to explain my Flex decision and think that since Thirteen Spikes Unlimited was created using only the freely available Flex3SDK and jEdit for editing. While the remainder of One of those Weeks will be created in Flash CS3 and the remainder of the Ultimate Retro Project will be finished using Java, future projects will be created using Flex. Flash will be used for asset creation but the projects themselves will be compilable using the freely available Flex3SDK. In a couple of years I will take another look at the browser landscape and possibly change my development direction, but right now I am going to be focusing on Flex development.

I have been playing around with a number of different languages and quite frankly am sick of having to shift my gears when switching between projects that are in different languages. Having all my work done in a single language makes my work easier. If a paying client wanted me to do some C++ or Java work for them then I would certainly do so but for Blazing Games and other programming I am doing in my spare time then the work will be done in Flex unless there is a very compelling reason to use a different language.

I really do not trust Microsoft, so even though Silverlight 2 has some really nice aspects to it unless I am being paid to use their platform I am not going to do so. Java still has a place in my heart but I feel that Sun just dropped the applet ball and FX is too little too late. Still, this is one case where I would like to be proven wrong. HTML 5 is no where near being a finalized standard so I might as well focus on Flex while I wait for it. Other browser based game development plug-ins simply do not have the installed base.

I have already pointed out numerous times that Flash CS3 is expensive, while Flex has a freely available SDK. Flex produces Flash output and I can still use Flash for the creation of assets and animation.

Trial Balloon Slasher movie

While I am still adding directory information to all of the game pages on the Blazing Games site, the big thing I was doing today is preparing for Friday's release. If you look at your calendar, you will know that it is Friday the 13th this Friday. As such, I am planning something special for that day. While the release will be a walk through of a certain action game, and as such probably not overly interesting to a large chunk of my regular visitors, what will be interesting will be what I am going to be doing to the game pages.

In politics, there is something known as trial balloons. These are when a politician (or PR firm) hints at something in order to see what the public reaction will be. This Friday's release will be similar. If the reaction to what I do is positive, then I will slowly (over the course of a few years) update all the game pages to support the new presentation format. If everybody hates it, the game pages will stick with the existing format until I can come up with something else.

While spreading the change over a long span of time might seem to go against web design principles, the site has grown rather huge so making the change all at once is no longer practical. The way things will work, it shouldn't have a huge impact on perception, and as all new and updated games all will use the new look, most visitors won't even notice that some pages use a outdated format.