A few weeks ago I decided to continue development on HaxePunk. It was spurred by some updates made to GitHub as well as interest in the forums. For those unaware of what HaxePunk is, it’s a game engine written in Haxe that can run on multiple platforms. The largest benefit is that it will compile natively for mobile devices as well as the three major PC platforms (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux).

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I’ve finally finished up my game Pounce and created a video on YouTube. The game is being reviewed but hopefully will get sponsored for a website soon. I’ll post up details later.

If you absolutely can’t wait to play the game feel free to contact me and I’ll make it happen.

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So I’m almost finished up with my game Pounce and having people playtest it has been a lot of fun but getting it on a mobile device has been a real pain. The biggest issue is frame rate which is a huge problem for an action game. I wanted to work on a game where the frame rate doesn’t really matter much and the first thing that popped into my head is an RPG.

Spire is a reflection of what NES RPG games were. The graphics are very simple, in fact I used the NES palette and limitations, and the gameplay will be limited to battles and exploration. This isn’t going to be the next Mass Effect but hopefully people will enjoy it for what it’s worth.

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I quickly ported the FlashPunk community UI recently and started building on top of the framework they built. Actually it diverged a bit from the original but I think for the better. The biggest change is that the NineSlice class is now extends from Graphic so that it can be drawn easily each frame.

At the moment I have buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, text fields, and panels working. I’ll see what I can do about a scrollbar and menus but I haven’t had a chance to hash them out yet. Although I think the code is flexible enough that most anything is possible.

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Several of the games I’m working on require the use of finite state machines for believable AI. For example, the game Pounce is using an FSM for the mice characters as they scurry around the level. Using them in games makes the AI characters seem more believable and help them react to many different situations. In fact they are used frequently in AAA game titles for bots and other autonomous characters. So just how do we implement them in our own games?

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I’m working on yet another prototype game and I feel like this one is already nearing completion. Pounce is a casual game that lets you catch mice by enticing the cat character with a toy. There isn’t any way to die and the levels are easy for most people to pick up.

My original goal was to make a game that anyone could play. This meant that the gameplay had to be simple but with enough twists to keep people interested. So I decided to use a cat for the protagonist and have the goal of catching mice in each level.

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Today I revisited the world of Spelunk and added a few new mechanics to the game. The first was a pretty generic wall jump which is found in a lot of games. I also added different climbable surfaces, beyond ladders, including chain walls, and a soft wall that requires a special climbing pick.

The entire game hinges on fun mechanics and exploration more than story. I’ve been trying to come up with some unique ideas as well as providing the player with the traditional Metroidvania style gameplay. The biggest thing that is missing from the game at this point is consumable items. Think back to Super Metroid where you collected missile, energy, and bomb tanks to increase the capacity of the respective items. I need something along the lines of these types of things to add to Spelunk.

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The past couple of weeks I’ve been writing Flash games in Actionscript and using two different frameworks to aid my development, Flixel and FlashPunk. I started using Flixel first since several games I’ve played have used it and it looked simple to get started with. FlashPunk was something I started using the last week and a half for the Vanished game prototype I shared this week.

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Lately I’ve been developing flash games with AS3 in FlashDevelop and FlexBuilder. I’ve used both Flixel and FlashPunk for development and feel that both of them have their own strengths and weaknesses. Maybe in a later post I’ll do a comparison between the two and explain which I prefer for most games.

Maybe in the upcoming weeks I’ll post a few tutorials and share the source code to the prototypes I’m working on.

Brenton and I have been working on a flash game for about a week to improve my AI programming. It’s pretty much just a simple boss fight where you battle against the evil cursor that has imprisoned Jezzball. The original game was a favorite of ours and we wanted a game with a bit of a twist.

So this blog post is my reflections on how development went for the game and what we could have done to make it better. Game development is an interesting process and we’re always looking for ways to improve.

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