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| Aeon Update 9/27/2010 - New Era Monday, September 27, 2010 3:40 am — Posted by Livio |
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It's a new era in the Aeon project for a number reasons:
- I'm in college now, which means that I have drastically less time to do anything that isn't homework or studying, thus affecting how much I can work on the game.
- I just downloaded an awesome new program called Flash Builder 4, which I have already spoken of before but will still mention it again later on in this post.
- Using the new program as an excuse, I'm gonna try to drastically improve the way the game is set up, while also introducing many great ideas I've been getting lately.
- And this is the first Aeon Update to go into the official Aeon Update Blog.
First of all, today I downloaded a "program" called Flash Builder 4 (also known as Flex Builder), made directly by Adobe. It's not really a program; it's an extension of another program that I already had, called Eclipse, which is one of the most popular programs out there that make coding faster and easier. It's ironic because I had to download Eclipse for my computer science class to code in Java, and I thought it had so many cool features that it led me to start looking for an AS3 equivalent. I spent a good amount of today looking through it. It's a little glitchy, but it's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. My favorite part would have to be the Debugger, which lets you stop the code at certain points so you can see what exactly is going on. It makes finding glitches so much easier.
I'm also using this program as a good opportunity to reconstruct a lot of bad parts of game more efficiently. I was looking through what I had so far and it's incredibly ugly. I plan to change the way many processes are done, making room for many new features, and all the while adding comments all over the place to make it easier for any potential future contributors. [Speaking of which, I completely forgot about that idea of finding people who may want to contribute to the game. I've been so busy lately, it's like the amount of work I have to do never goes down.]
As for the big ideas that I plan to implement:
- Customized Start Screens - I posted about this idea a while ago. I'm referring to the screen that you see right before you start playing a level, the "jump to start" screen (actually, since the last demo, it's now the "press space to enter the level" screen). The idea is to completely get rid of the dumb level preview, and to just show the entire level zoomed out. Along with that will come extensive customization options for that screen, which will let you decide if the background is an extension of the terrain, level background, white void, or something else entirely. Or you could decide to not show the level at all, to keep the map hidden, or only show the level zoomed in to the specific character, or zoomed to a specific area. You could also theoretically change the contents on that start screen, like how the title looks, where it is, if there's any additional text on other parts of the screen, maybe some instructions or links to instructions if it's a sandbox level, or however that stuff will work in the future.
- Settings for Level-Boundary Collisions - You should be able to control what happens when the player or certain objects reach the dimensional boundaries of the level. Ideas for certain settings include:
- Solid/Terrain - The boundaries will act just like the level was wrapped in terrain
- Invisible Forcefield - Like what happens in HATPC. Nothing is allowed to pass the boundary, but objects keep acting like nothing's in their way
- Infinite Void - Basically, nothing happens. You just keep going forever. This should come with a setting to kill you after a certain amount of time.
- Flip - Think of pacman, where you walk off one side of the level and you suddenly come out on the opposite side. This could lead to lots of cool stuff.
- Different settings for each side of the level boundary - For example, the left and right sides can be forcefields while the bottom and top are flips.
- Merge the Level Editor and the Level Player - This is a pretty crazy idea that could be worth looking into. It's more of a programming idea, but basically the level editor is really just an overlay that is put on top of the Level itself. Think of the current demo: you hit the demo button, wait for it to load, press space and start playing it. Now imagine that you wanted to edit that level, so you see everything revert to its original location and then the level editor appears directly on top of the level itself, like as an overly. There are several advantages to this idea:
- The level editor does a much, much better job of visually representing your level. In fact, it's running off of the same code, so it looks exactly like how it would when you start the level.
- This really would add functionality for real-time editing, very convenient. Many of the abilities that the new editor would need in order to update the level as you make changes to it could potentially be taken advantage of later to make a real-time editing mode.
- These "abilities" could also be taken advantage to add even more options for tiles and events in the game, so that you could make a box that changes the level's background color when hit, for example.
- And I have a ton of other ideas, but they're mostly about how to better program certain things, so no reason in explaining that.
| Livio | ||
Age: 31 Karma: 470 Posts: 9620 Gender: Male Location: Arizona, USA pm | email |
It depends on how we do it. We could possibly keep only one or two versions of the FLA uploaded, while keeping one or two copies of each AS file maintained. The only reason the FLA would get updated would be if we wanted to add another image or sound file to the library But yeah, this sounds a lot easier. I'm liking the idea of keeping stuff here. | |
| Livio | ||
Age: 31 Karma: 470 Posts: 9620 Gender: Male Location: Arizona, USA pm | email |
Alright, I figured out how to delete the open source project. I'll set up the files here this weekend. Until then, I have a research analysis paper to write. | |
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