Space ROX V 0.5

Of course, the point of any game is having some adversary to fight – be it enemy ships or floating space debris. Here I’ve taken the particle effect I created for the thrusters and blasters and applied them many-fold on a bunch of asteroids.

The animation for shooting the laser blasters has been modified to have multiple frames for the flash point, and the guns were syncronized.

The next objective is refining the control scheme and creating collisions.

Something of note – it seems that the up-arrow-key, the left-arrow-key in conjunction with the spacebar does not seem to work. Oddly enough, if you use the numeric keypad arrow keys (at least on my keyboard) the limitation goes away. To offset this, I also enabled the A, W, and D keys to do the same function as the arrow keys.

Redoing the control scheme is something that is on the list as well – perhaps using the mouse to shoot which will eliminate this arrow key issue.

Also, an inherent flaw in Actionscript 3.0 is a notable lack of a “Collection” class. Unfortunately the built-in “Array” and “Object” classes does not allow me to recast a stored object back to the original object type. I borrowed Michael James William’s Collection class to handle the multiple asteroids floating around.

Check it out!

Space ROX V 0.4

Now you can hear Space ROX – the music that is.  The issue with music and sound however, is that dramatically increases the size of the output Flash file. To compensate for this, I created a Pre-Loader for the flash file.

Also, the keyboard input does not work for Flash files unless the Flash control has focus. To accomplish this, I ask the user to click on the Flash file to begin play.

Check it out!

Because of its close association with toys, gaming has not yet achieved a sense of “legitimacy” as other artistic mediums such as the cinema, despite it’s close associations.  There are a lot of people who wish for the medium to fully mature into a full artistic medium and to be recognized by and large by the art community.  But this failure is largely due to the fault of the game makers themselves – even the big-AAA producers.

A lot of my rants against the blatant sexualization of women in games may be taken as moralizing, but in reality, cheap sex is never taken seriously – even in the field of art.

For the medium of game development and design to achieve true legitimacy is to maintain artistic integrity and cultural relevance while balancing it with putting food on the table.  “Art for art’s sake” is also self-defeating because it takes the opposite extreme.  True art maintains the balance between being socially relevant, artistic in skill, and popular in appeal.

Gaming yet needs its Shakespeare who perfectly balanced all those elements – and even played a dangerous political game of social protest against religious descrimination.

Perhaps this is a cue for me to enter this contest:

The 2009 Life, Love Game Design Challenge – Can you create a game about Teen Dating Violence, without using violence.

The origin of this contest is a very sad story and well worth reading, but I believe games like this need to happen more often.