The addition this week was of a bit of animation to bring life to the character, this isn’t intended to be the end movement – just amusing animation. I might split this off as a separate game itself because I was in stitches.
The perhaps less noticeable part is that there’s now audio for the rain which there wasn’t before. This isn’t even a recording of rain, it’s the sound of oil/water boiling/bubbling away with a bit of added effects and hissing removed thanks to Audacity.
We’re getting there, slowly. Part of the experimentation is shaping the game as much as the original concept is.
I take a relaxed approach to the project development I do, because I have a full time job and a home and my health to care for. This is why I dedicate at least an hour a week to the game development, to coax it into action. Over the holidays it has been a bit stagnant due to being away from the computer. So it amazes me even more as to the advancement we can do with just a small amount of time.
Here we have a moveable character, with a platform, collision, particles and, though you cannot hear it, background music.
For a good, long while I’ve wanted to develop. When I was young, I wanted to create – I would sit there, feeling bored, staring at my Commodore Amiga 1200 without the internet, with little guidance and money and not knowing what or how to do things to actually produce something.
I had access to BASIC on the ZX Spectrum 48k and the Amiga, but aside from coding Pontoon and ‘POKE’ing some code into Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy but I didn’t get much further with it than that.
When I studied at University, I met some fine fellows who were on a Games Development course (and Games Design). Which re-sparked my interest in creating something, aside from doing the HND in Computing (Software Development) which almost scratched the itch, meeting these friends meant years afterwards of the words “let’s make a mod!” (mainly aimed at the game Neverwinter Nights) which, like the other intentions of creating and producing something substantial, unfortunately amounted to little.
However, I’ve tried to push on, between groups I’ve started to prototype some small scale work and today, with the work of three of us, we made it rain in Adobe Flash using ActionScript v3.
It took one persons familiarity with the API Flixel , my understanding, finding and reading of reference documentation along with the IDE and a person who has good programming knowledge to get it working and acting, like rain.
To this project myself and the other two casually dedicate only an hour a week to the development of it and other projects, but in three weeks (three hours) of work. This feels like an achievement and with that we’re so far satisfied.
