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.

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World of Goo creator Kyle Gabler has a keynote address at the IGDA’s “Global Game Jam.” The Game Jam is a 48-Hour rapid prototyping session where the objective is to create a complete game within 48 hours. One of the most impressive things that Kyle mentions are the number of great games that came out of such fast-paced environments.

In terms of game programming time, Space ROX has less than 8 hours worth of real programming time under its belt. More time has been spent polishing the actual assets of the game, somewhere upwards to 24 hours or more. I’ll be sure to note where we are in terms of development and assets once we hit a total of 48 hours of development time (between two people) and when I hit 48 hours of strict programming time to show how much a small team can accomplish in a short amount of time.

The more I read about small elite development teams versus juggernaut development houses, the more I am convinced of their superiority in terms of quality and design. The designers of Little Big Planet got no bigger than 31 people while intending to keep the team size no greater than 20.

It’s been a pretty rough week so my development has been slow going for Space ROX the last few days and I’ve lost momentum. But having a 3 year old begging me to make the spaceship shoot its cannons has been more than a motivator for me to get right back on track and moving. Seeing the delight on his face when the spaceship could finally shoot its guns was well worth the lost sleep.

Now that he can shoot the ships guns, he wants something to shoot. I can’t wait to see his face when I get that part done. It’s really exciting being a game developer dad. You have the most enthusiastic QA team ever.

Space ROX V 0.3

Now, using a mix of local and global coordinate magic, we can put a laser blast on the correct firing points of the Space ROX ship – one on the left and one on the right using alternating fire. Rather than using some complex math to figure out the scale and rotation of the ship MovieClip, I can derive where I need to put the laser blast picture.

Check it out!