Fruiti Blox finished, and thus ends a year of AS3 learning

Today I delivered the final source files to Candystand.com for my latest game Fruiti Blox. They should be releasing it in January 2009, so I’ll write again when it’s live for playing, but it was a great experience for me and they were fantastic people to work with. I can’t wait to see the game live.

Oddly enough today also marks the first anniversary of my journey into AS3 and Flash. It was a year ago today (back in 2007) that I started teaching myself AS3. I had never touched a single line of ActionScript in my life before. All of the AS2 code I saw scared the hell out of me, the sheer mess of it really went against my coding OCD! But AS3 was different. It was familiar, and powerful. I armed myself with Moock’s Essential AS3 bible, the AS3 Cookbook, a copy of Flash CS3 and set to work.

The journey has been incredible. I’m no stranger to programming, especially not games development, but I honestly have not had this much development fun for many many years. I’ve always said that limitation breeds creativity (a true mantra of the demo scene), and I found the limitations of Flash were what drew me in, but the sexiness that is AS3 captivated me and never let go.

My first ever game was called “Go Fish”, and it involved making a fish swim through an ever encroaching sea cavern. It taught me a lot about how AS3 worked, in particular how it handled bitmaps and mouse events, and the whole process of screen updating. Collision detection was ropey (at best), the graphics chunky and I stupidly set the frame rate at 60 fps. But it was a start.

From there I moved onto a few small demo effects, porting over my old DarkBASIC code into AS3. Starfields, morphing balls, sine-waves, that kind of thing. Seeing these effects come alive in my browser was awesome. It was like meeting an old friend you haven’t seen for ages.

By this point we were into the middle of January, and I wanted to create a game for one of the web sites we look after at work. I figured it needed to be quite simple as it was my first Flash game project, so I kicked off with a “match 2 cards” affair. The end result was Match Quest for the Shaun the Sheep web site. I did all the visuals and code myself. I was so green to Flash in general that I didn’t realise that you could set an image in the library to use say 80% compression and that it would still retain alpha levels (I figured it’d convert it into a jpeg and loose all alpha, like a browser does). This meant the game was massive, over 2MB in size 🙂 so large I even wrote a pre-loader “space invaders” game for people to play as it loaded! But it was the first rung of the ladder for me, and I was pleased.

From there I moved almost directly onto my next game Colour Chain and it was released one month later. It was another puzzle game, this time involving more arcade style effects (nice particle trails, exploding blocks, etc) and yes – sound effects! (Match Quest is utterly devoid of any sound). People genuinely loved this game, and it’s played by thousands of people across the web still today. Something that amazes me.

I was now in my element and learning at an extremely rapid pace. I won’t bore you with a complete chronology of events for the year, but suffice to say we’re now 12 months from that infamous day and my coding life is a much richer and different place because of it. I wanted to release 12 games within one year, and I sort of failed to do this – I actually released 10. I guess if you include the early Go Fish and the Space Invaders pre-loader game then I coded 12, but I’m not one for cheating 🙂

Aside from the coding I’m really amazed at the Flash game developer community. I have met some truly great people this past year, not least of which include the dynamic duo over at 8-bit Rocket; quite frankly we’re like UK/US carbon copies of each other given our loves and pasts! Also a quick shout to squize / GYM. A total ActionScript powerhouse if ever there was one, a truly awesome coder, and dude your tenacity at capturing all Xbox achievements scares the hell out of me. Do you secretly own all Pokemon beasts? Also the great people on FlashGameLicense.com (both running it and using it), and the sponsors I’ve met as a result. FGL believed in my games, which lead to real world cash, which lead to utter surprise and amazement from me 🙂 Full respect for all they do.

So what does the future hold? Right now I’ve got 3 days left at work before I leave for Christmas, and I’m not back in there until January 5th 2009. I’m busy coding a MMO Flash based virtual world for a client, which is a whole new set of challenges believe me! This should see release in March 2009, and it will take up most of my commercial development time. But of course I’ll still be building games “for fun” as well. I have a number of ideas fleshed out on paper, one of which is well into production with art assets already underway. One thing I am determined to do is move away from puzzle games next year and focus more on action and arcade titles. Right now the game in production is a top-down shooter similar to Alien Breed / Gauntlet. So it’s requiring a mass of new technologies for me, and PixelBlitz is going to get some serious updates in the process.

There’s still a few weeks left until 2009 but I’m going to take them off, away from games coding and instead spend extra time with my family, read some books and hopefully finally complete Puzzle Quest on my 360. The stack of books I have here should interest a lot of you reading this blog, so I’ll write about them later on. Until then I hope you all have a great Christmas / Holiday season, and look forward to seeing what 2009 will bring us all.

Posted on December 17th 2008 at 2:05 am by Rich.
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