touch my pixel

We might start throwing up some tests of games we’re working on. I hope it will be good to get some feedback – but keep in mind, this IS in development, so go easy ;P

So – whats deadsun? Thats the codename (hah how mysterious!) for my latest game, Tarwin is working on a few other things. It will hopefully be release on the iphone too (hence the format).

The sun is dead, and post apocolyptic radiation is pouring out of the sky. You need to gather it to your cities to power them. In this test, you can play with the mechanic of collecting energy from the black-holes which expel it. There will be more advanced levels to come, which involve protecting the cities, tba.

Use Keys 1-8 to flick between the levels.

NOTE: please view this on its own page (not with all other blog posts) as it probably will run slow otherwise – we are working on fixing this weakness of our blog.

UPDATE – I HAVE TAKEN THIS TEST DOWN UNTIL WE DEVELOP THE GAME.

After realising we have a few people following us on RSS we decided to start publishing it in a way we could see how many people that actually is. So we’re now publishing through FeedBurner. If you’re already following us it would be great if you could change the address to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TouchMyPixel

Thanks!

And lots more coming very soon …

So after installing windows 7 i’ve had to reinstall all of my goods, the probem (ithink) is that installed flashplayer BEFORE Flash. This meant that installed its old flashPlayers over the top of the newer ones, so that i installed some of the newer ones AGAIN, and in the mess of many installs, i found that my FlashDevelop wasnt using the debug player anymore! gah!

Problem: FlashDevelop wont use the dubug version of flashPlayer when in popup mode (you need this to have trace’s come back to flash via ExternalInterface)

So, in reinstalled the debugplayer standalone about 5 times, in various varieties, before realizing that: FlashDevelop uses Ie’s ActiveX version of the player for popup mode

Solution: Install debug player for IE

since i dont really use IE, this was slightly overlooked, but now it all works fine. Just a little bit of knowledge that people might want to know

Tony

For a new game I’m designing, I’ve been learning a little about particles. Its actually really simple to get some great effects. I found a good as3 lib http://flintparticles.org – but in the aim of learning, and due to the fact that i need to use haxe not as3 (planning to target iphone) i’ve started from scratch. Ive only implemented a Gravity Well, and Gravity – but plan to add some magnets, simple collisions, brownian motion and maybe particle to particle attraction.

A few important things are:

• Rendering direct to bitmap- not using MovieClip or Sprite – as they kill performance
• Using copyPixels over draw – again for performance
• Using an Object Pool, for less memory and garbage collection issues in the future
• Created an ‘effectors’ interface for applying multiple effects to particles
• Frame independant (time based) motion for more predictable performance

so lets see a test:

Update: Here’s another example – not in the source, but just adding a colorTransform- fun fun!

heres the haxe code: download

cheers,

Tony

After the haxe meeting last saturday night, i was excited that the topic of targeting the iphone was brought up. This could cause a lot of adoption of haxe as a language. Being able to develop games for flash and Iphone at the same time would be perfect and something lots of flash game developers would love!

I tried my hand at compiling c++ into and ObjC wrapper a few weeks ago, and in my inexperience… failed miserably. Hugh (the haxe C++ target creator) has taken the challenge, and in the last few days, successfully made some first tests for haxe C++ on the iphone. Hopfully over the next few weeks everything will continue to come to plan (and more people just on bord for testing and dev) and we’ll have an iphone target

I cant wait to get a chance to do some testing (looking to buy a macbook next week when we go to LA for e3).

read about it here:

http://gamehaxe.com/2009/05/22/haxe-on-iphone-simulator/

cheers

Tony

In 2d platform games, you often want to have the different layers or graphics move at different speeds depending on the players movement. As you also probably know this is called parallaxing.

Your layers might be for example: a forground, midground (where the player often is), and multiple backgrounds. As the player moves around in the midground, you will want that layer to move as to keep the player in the middle of the screen. The foreground layer will want to move MORE, as to have a faster movement (looking closer) and the background less, as to look furthur away. Lets look at an example:

In this example the red dot is the “player” which is placed inside the midground (layer2).

It makes sense that closer layers move more- and distant layers move alot less. This means that your closer layers will need be bigger. Since size it directly related to the movement, and therefore their percieved distance on the imaginary Z axis – in our example we’ll define a layers disance via its size. In the above example, the layers are as follows:

They have been given a black border to illustrate their size, this would normally be invisible so that it doesnt show in the test. The rect of a layer is set automatically via getting the layers ‘bounds’. You have the option to set the rect manually. This can be useful for cropping into gfx, cleaning up the edges , etc.

You may notice that there is an AS3 version of the test AND a haXe version. The haXe version uses the example.swf (generated by flash) for the gfx. It will not use any code from flash – its code is in the src_hx folder.

I’ve started to think about how to allow the ‘camera’ to zoom in and out on the scene… that’ll be a test soon.

Download source code here

We gave a talk about the making of Scarygirl last night at Dissecta at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

It went pretty well – couldn’t see too many Zs floating up above the audience’s heads. Thanks to Dissecta for asking us to speak and we’ll be seeing you all again for the next meet in a month or so!

The outline for the talk can be viewed at: http://sg.touchmypixel.com/dissecta/. Just click at the left and right of the slides to move through. Interactive elements can be used (after clicking on them) normally with the arrow keys, space, shift, and A, S and D keys (all of them use different controls, sorry).

Here are the best images we got, really should have got some better documentation! On the left Tarwin Stroh-Spijer & on the right: Tony Polinelli