Posts Tagged ‘nape’

• By Rich

  Tags

  game prototype, nape, paratrooper

  Posted in

  Experiments

  9 comments

  Paratroopers: Have a play and throw us your ideas please

  19th Jan 2011

  9

  In an unusual move I’ve released a bare-bones prototype of a game (embedded after the jump), with the sole aim of hearing your feedback on it.

  You control a cannon. Characters are descending from the sky in an attempt to bust-up your base below. If too many get down it will be Game Over (although not in this prototype) as they bash through your base. Right now the thinking is that you are supposed to “juggle” them off-screen rather than killing them.

  Don’t be swayed by the soldier sprite, or title of the prototype. In actual fact we may go for something totally different aesthetically. Here is a concept sketch Ilija did. It shows where the characters could go graphically.

  

  The idea being if you hit the baddies on the head, they “die”. It is their weak spot.

  So please have a play and throw your ideas at us in the comments! Ideally focusing on where we could take the game play (the Recycle Bin?)

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• By Rich

  Tags

  nape, physics, pixel smash

  Posted in

  ActionScript3

  3 comments

  Pixel Smash Source Code Released

  8th Jan 2011

  3

  Just a quick one, but some people asked me if I’d send them the source to the Pixel Smash demo I posted the other day. I figure it can’t hurt, so I’ve packaged it up, removed some useless bits, added comments and thrown it together in a zip.

  Pixel Smash source code (includes Flash Develop project, set-up with Nape linked in ready to compile)

  Should work “out of the box” on PCs running Flash Develop. Will need rebuilding in anything else. It isn’t optimised by a long shot, so make of it what you will.

• By Rich

  Tags

  nape, physics, pixel smash

  Posted in

  Experiments

  5 comments

  Pixel Smash Test 1 – Smash the heck out of some pixels

  6th Jan 2011

  5

  I was chatting to Ilija tonight about doing a real fast turn-around game (1 week max). The projects we’ve got in build right now are really big, and I felt like I needed a “quick win” to kick-off the year good and proper. We bounced a couple of ideas around and stuck on the concept of basically blowing the crap out of over-sized sprites, pixel by pixel.

  So I built a quick prototype just to see if this idea had wings, and here it is. There’s no “game” as such because this was a 1 hour proof of concept tech demo. It was to see if we could actually blow sprites up, and have it look nice. And I’m very happy with the result. Now we’ve confirmed that we’ll move onto the next stage.

  

  Click the pic above or here to play. It is massively un-optimised. Those are just Sprites with drawRects in them! But I still get a solid 60fps in Release player, but it dips lower in Debug Player (and I’ve noticed on Macs). So your fps mileage will vary. But hey, it’s Flash, when doesn’t it? In talking to Adam he reckoned throwing a blitting engine behind it (ala Flixel) with baked sprite rots would speed it up massively. I’ll give it a bash and see. The slow-down might be my abuse of the physics engine rather than the rendering. But there is a definite overhead there we can eliminate too.

  And no, it’s not Box2D. I’m using Nape which is the new darling physics engine on the block. It’s doing all the heavy lifting. And wow, does it do it well! It’s one killer physics library that I urge you all to check out. Simpler than Box2D and considerably faster. Use it, love it, support it 🙂

  Also one final random bit: read this excellent blog post by Ben McGraw on the dynamics of Super Mario Brothers 3! Go enjoy.