Space ROX V 0.2

One of the markings of a professional game vs amateur game is the amount of polish is put into the final product.  Everything from the art, sound, game control must be fine-tuned into a mirror shine.  One of the simple ways of adding that touch to any game are particle effects.

For Space ROX, the first particle effect I added was a thruster trail.  Rather than simply turning on and off the rear thruster animation, I added an actual trail to show where the ship has been.  This is accomplished with a simple “particle” effect.

To create a particle in Flash you don’t need a complex library that some 3rd party sells you.  A particle can simply be a MovieClip object that is dynamically added to the scenegraph and then removed once the animation is over.  In this case, the thruster vapor trail is just a green ellipse that fades to zero opacity and then removes itself from its parent.

It’s a simple programming object, but you can already see the results - an effect that shows that more thought was put into the game, and a little polish that can make all the difference from appearing as an amateur – or a seasoned pro.

Check it out!

Space ROX V 0.1

One of the most important things to keep going is momentum.  Especially for indies where projects start and stop and most things only remain a “pet project” and never see the light of day, momentum is something vital to a project.

To stave off boredom and to keep momentum, it is important to have short iterations for development.  A short iteration must be complete and demonstrates a complete piece of functionality.  This is the Agile method applied to game development.

A short iteration also allows plenty of feedback from both the developers and designers to see if the game is shaping up in the proper direction.  It allows questions to be asked like, “Is it fun?”   It is an oddity but sometimes it seems like this question is not asked by game developers don’t ask until the product is almost finished.  But this is true for a lot of software development companies, including government consulting.  The question, “Does this satisfy the customer’s requirements?” is something only asked right before User Acceptance Testing (UAT), and rarely asked during the development process.  This is the key strength of Agile Development – fast development and frequent feedback.

To demonstrate, I am attempting to put together an “asteroids”-like game.  And I will post frequently each of my development steps in this process.  Here is version 0.1.  This is a demonstration artwork and animation as well as a simple control scheme using just the arrow keys.

Check it out!