A little while ago I started a side project to my adventure/management game Wildhollow: a simple Flash game for the website as a teaser. I’m aiming for a game where you learn what animals like what types of food; something that’s useful to know in the real game too.

In my previous two versions I was using…well…Flash, but now I’ve experimented with Flex and lately with flixel, a game framework compatible with Flex. Things are progressing much more smoothly now that I can focus on writing the ActionScript code instead of mucking about with learning basic Flash concepts. This is as far as I’ve come right now:

I’m starting to figure out the different game states, and I’ve added stages as well as a simple scoring system. By the way, if you get past level 5 the game will crash. Just so you know. It’s far from finished – but the main idea is beginning to crystalize.

Things left on the todo list:

• More stages with different animals
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Sound and music
• Better loading screen
• One-screen tutorial
• General design issues – improve the look of the game
• Try out small things like should the food items start bouncing instead of just moving forward, etc
• Misc things like KarjaSoft logo, link to the Wildhollow homepage, optimize the game for size, etc…

Time to get some work done if I want to finish this before the Wildhollow release…

As a side project to my adventure/management game Wildhollow I’m working on a simple Flash game for the website – a Wildhollow teaser, so to speak. I’m aiming for a game where you learn what animals like what types of food; something that’s useful to know in the real game too.

Flash development is something that’s completely new to me, so this is a fun opportunity to learn more about how to make web games. This is as far as I’ve gotten right now:

In this version you can drag food items and drag them to the bovine animal. Feeding it something it likes results in a big boost of the score, but feeding it something it dislikes results in negative points. You can see that bovine beasts don’t like fish or meat, for example.

Right now there’s just one animal, but – as the “Stage 1″ text in the beginning hints at – I’m planning on having several stages with different animal types.

Still not very impressive. But from the last time I’ve refactored a lot of the code, learned how to use external Actionscript files, learned about creating MovieClips and applying filters through the code, and learned that it’s very easy to extend a MovieClip with needed variables. For example, each food item (and the animal) have a value assigned to it to identify what type it is.

Still a lot of things missing, though:

• More animals
• Maybe animations for the animals
• Logic to determine when a game is lost/won
• Decide how a game stage should work
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Investigate if there can be smoother scrolling for the foodstuffs
• Sound
• Loading screen
• Title screen
• One-screen tutorial

We’ll see how far I get next week!

A playable and finishable version of Wildhollow is ready, but I’m still expecting some feedback to determine what else needs to be done before I can release a public version of the game. In the meantime I’ve decided to delve into the dark arts of web game development – more specifically, Flash and Actionscript coding.

As a side project to Wildhollow I’m planning on creating a simple Flash game for the website – a Wildhollow teaser, so to speak. I’m aiming for a game where you learn what animals like what types of food; something that’s useful to know in the real game too. This is as far as I’ve gotten right now:

You can drag the food items if you click and hold the mouse button. My plan is to let the player feed animals this way later.

Not very impressive, no. But so far I’ve learned how to create instances of movie clips, deal with arrays, handle mouse input and make a single main loop function that takes care of all instances.

So, what’s missing? A lot:

• Animals to feed with the foodstuffs
• Animations for the animals
• Scoring
• Logic to determine when a game is lost/won
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Investigate if there can be smoother scrolling for the foodstuffs
• Sound
• Loading screen
• Title screen
• One-screen tutorial

Still, it’s not much work at all compared to the complete Wildhollow game…