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!

Tags: flash, Games, Indie Games, web games, Wildhollow

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 at 4:12 am and is filed under Wildhollow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.