Doing it at last!
I’ve enjoyed the Flash work I’ve done over the last few years, but there’s always been a wish to make a game. People don’t come along and give you great game projects to make if you don’t have a fat portfolio of Flash games already – so I’ve realised the only thing to do is create a fat portfolio of Flash games myself… Call me slow if you like.
Having been hit with this realisation sat watching bad TV at Christmas, I practically teleported back to Brighton and spent the first week of the year learning how to make a scrolling platform game by studying Tonypa’s excellent Flash game tutorials.
Once that was up, I found it a bit limiting, and it wasn’t quite fast enough (at no fault of the tutorials, just that Flash has moved on a bit since it was written – it’s still a fine place to start).
I spent the rest of the month studying and rewriting Strille’s Flash Platform Engine Demo for ActionScript 2.0, which given Strille’s penchant for optimisation, was one of the most daunting tasks I’ve ever faced as a programmer. It has some of the most cryptic code I’ve ever seen. It is a marvellous design though, so I thoroughly recommend mastering it if you’re looking for the best scrolling engine in Flash.
Once that was all OOP’d, I needed to learn about collision detection…
… cue two months of extremely hard 90 degree learning curves, which led to me actually giving up and borrowing three seasons of CSI to get my mind off it.
Then about three weeks/seasons of CSI later I found another of Tonypa’s offerings in the form of Vector based collision detection in Flash.
After those two months of stress and soul searching, to find such a well written tutorial online for everyone to use seemed like a miracle; a rather embarassing miracle considering it was right next door to where I started…
So I was on my way to making a platform game. Little did I realise that it would completely take over my life…