The current project, "
Phantom Mansion" is a port of a mobile phone game.
When the site actually goes live you'll see ( If your interested ) case studies for all the projects. The case studies are written in a more professional style, outlining the thought processes as well as the development cycle.
They're glossy and nice.
When it comes to describing Mansions' development, I imagine I'll write something like "
A difficult development process due to adhering to the existing design restrictions".
In real life, Mansions' development has been a total cunt.
This is why I've been awol from the blog, and I owe a dozen people a dozen emails ( Sorry ). Indulge me why I vent my spleen a little. The game is I guess what would be called an "
Arcade Puzzler" and as a game it's pretty sweet. It's just that it was designed for java, and so doesn't play to any of Flash's strengths.
At present I'm in the hell that is depth sorting. It's not something I ever seem to do too well, just another black hole in my mind when it comes to coding, but this isn't the usual swapDepths based on the sprites y position. Nope, that would be far too simple. The game has bridges that you can walk over and under. And the baddies can walk over and under. And you can push crates ( You know the score by now ).
Not too harsh. But, and this it the beauty of it, all the sprites are offset on their y position by around 10 pixels ( ie, the image is placed at -10 on the y axis ). This was because in the original it allowed for simple depth sorting with some of the tiles in the game ( So the sprites wouldn't have to be behind certain tiles, so you don't need to worry about sorting for that ). Easy old school trick that surely could never come back to haunt you ( And no, that wasn't a pun ).
So you've got a bridge, and you put it in a higher layer than the sprites, so you can walk beneath it. When you have to walk over the bridge, simple and sly, just have a copy of the same sprite in a layer higher than that, and _visible=true and it's job done.
But, hang on, the sprites are offset. So although they're 32x32 pixels, the same as the tiles, they actually cover the tile above. Surely that means that walking infront of a bridge would lead to the sprites top 10 pixels ( Roughly a head's worth ) being obscured.
Ok, not a problem, we just check that and turn on our higher up copy of the sprite and it's all fixed. Internally every sprite has a zdepth var, so we know what "level" it's on, so you can walk over a bridge and a baddie walking beneath you can't kill you ( It wouldn't be the fairest of games otherwise ).
Where were we ? Oh yeah, at the foot of a bridge bump the sprites level to 1 and display the sprite in the top layer. Now if the sprite is to the left / right of the bridge we shouldn't do this, so we don't. I'm building up to the kicker here. Let's just push that crate along. Oh arse, it's over the bottom of a bridge, let's knock it's level to 1 and blah, blah, blah. The player's sprite whose just pushed it there though, he's still on layer 0, he doesn't know anything about the bridge. So what happens when he goes to push the crate, which is higher than he is ?
There's the bridge, tinted orange so I can see it's in a higher layer. The crate which overlaps it tinted green, again so we can tell it's not in layer 0, but look at the Hector ( Our hero ), he's not green 'cause he knows no better.
This is part of why this is a "A difficult development process". There are way more joys that I could share, but I'll hold fire. No one wants to read about someone bitching about their job.
Squize.