I'm starting a little experiment today. It could either prove to be something quite cool, or I'll really fall flat on my face with it. Lucky that I don't mind either way really.
Rather than doing a diary style collection of posts about a specific game's development, I'm going to post daily builds. Every day I work on it, even if it's just to tweak a sprites position quickly 'cause it's bugging me, I'll upload that new build.
Now this doesn't mean I'm going to be working on it every day. There aren't going to be a nice collection of sequential posts here until it's done. This is a personal project + Christmas is coming up, and life just isn't so smooth as to allow that.
If I get an urgent job come in then this is on the back burner straight away.
Also if you stick with this ( Never mind me sticking with it ) you're going to see versions which crash, versions which are buggy, versions with no preloader so you're looking at a blank screen for a while. It's a true game in development. I'm not going to fluff it up for you guys, or put some spin on it and work 8 days on it and then pretend that's just 1 day. It's going to be the same as that game you've got in development on your hd, with all the traces that say "Sprite collision failed, wtf?" and all the nasty things that you'd have to hide from the clients build.
That's the caveat out of the way. What are the good parts to this project after all the negative ? I guess that's down to you guys. If you find it interesting then the blog is doing it's job.
X. That's the game. It's an old asteroids clone that I did years ago ( It was my 2nd ever complete game, 2003 some time ? It was part of the "Majestic Trilogy" of games. I'll dig out a link for a future post ).
I've already done a reskin of it, X+, but for some reason that has never seen the light of day. I was looking at it recently and realised it's just a bit too dated now to use, it's as1 so publishing it for F8 so I can use the blendModes in there is really a lot of trouble, so it's either release something that's not as good as it should be, or re-writing it in as3. X++ it is then.
I'm weird when it comes to coding. I know a lot of developers just like to get in there and get the engine working, and then work back from that. I'm very linear, like a bad fps. I need to start from the beginning, the title screen. It's important to get that look & feel in place to set the tone for the rest of the game.
So that's what we've got, a title screen. There are buttons that rollOver, but don't lead anywhere. The background image is a place holder as we're going to have a flv running there instead ( I did have a flv to test in place, borrowed from
here ( Click the video button ) but it bumped the file to 9meg, so it's been reduced to a static image until we get the final render done ).
Enough words, here's the front-page for the
xtreme coding experimentMore soon, although I'm going to try avoid saying what's coming, 'cause it usually falls through and I go off and do something else.
Squize.