So after spending the past couple of months building a blitting tile & game engine, I was almost finished last night with my Part 4 – Towers code. I had checked out Starling last year and remembered watching Lee Brimlow’s Introducing the Starling Framework video. Now that I had slogged through a lot of the heavy lifting myself in my own ZFEngine, I thought I’d go back through some tutorials and check out the Starling community as it is now. Aaaaaand that was the end of ZFEngine. It was both demoralizing and exciting to see how I could use Starling to do exactly the same things I had done by-hand, except Starling does them cross-platform, and takes advantage of GPU-acceleration. I think I’m going to leave the other tutorials up, but I will be rebooting the series from the beginning using Starling. And the posts might actually be more polished …
Read More…AS3 Experiments – MVC in AS3 Tutorial
I’ve been using Backbone.js and jQuery quite extensively for the past year or so and I’ve only recently gotten back into AS3 dev. And I’ve never actually ever used any MVC framework in AS3/Flex, so I wanted to take a quick break away from my AS3 game engine series to have fun and mess around with MVC in AS3. As I didn’t want to stray too far from my game engine, I decided I wanted to whip up some base Model/View/Controller classes, and then extend those to an EnemyModel/EnemyView/EnemyController class. The reason this is in “AS3 Experiments” is because this isn’t just straightforward MVC. I’ve added an expandable Model. Imagine you’re loading in JSON from a file or endpoint and you pass the data straight in to the Model’s constructor or some “setPropertiesFromJSON()” type function. I wanted to play around with the idea of, “what happens if that JSON file …
Read More…AS3 Game Engine – Part 3 – Enemies & Movement
It’s been a little over a month since the last part of the series. I spent 2 out of the 4 weeks of April traveling to NYC for a week for SugarCon, then another week out in CA at my employer’s HQ for a developer sprint. On top of all the travel, man, this 3rd Part in my AS3 Game Engine series is pretty massive. I began the series aiming for a 1-2 week turn-around on parts… but after all the travel and all the work in this part, I’m alright with it taking almost 5 weeks. This post should be huge with all the new tweaks and changes I’ve added, so grab a fresh beer and get ready! If you’ll recall back in Part 1 – Tile Engine I started things off by saying how a goal of this series was to be less of a very direct set …
Read More…AS3 Game Engine – Part 2 – Waypoints & Event Hub
I’ve added Waypoints and a global EventHub to my AS3 game engine. The waypoints system is pretty straightforward, but I also added something new to my EventHub that I think is really slick. Coming from a few years of working on a frontend built in JavaScript, Backbone, and jQuery, I felt that AS3 was a little strict in how it handles events. For most of your AS3 event listening life, you have to have access to a specific instance of the event dispatcher from anywhere else in the app that you want to specifically listen for that dispatcher to dispatch its event. If you want to listen for when an object dispatches that it was hit by an object or you want to listen for when your tiling engine is done parsing tiles, you have to gain access across classes to a reference to that object, then add your listener. …
Read More…AS3 Game Engine – Part 1 – Tile Engine
So I’ve made my way back to working on my Flash Game Engine (which I’m referring to as ZFEngine) and I wanted to start a tutorial series about how I’m coding it. Hopefully over the next few weeks I’ll have some solid code and posts up so anyone can follow along. First post up is on the 2D tile engine! The first file project can be found here I feel with a lot of tutorials, you get a very quick, direct snippet of code in a very sterile environment that’s perfectly set up to show you something. I guess that’s good for most people, but most times I read tutorials I’m wanting to learn things outside of the realm of my question; I want to pick up tips and tricks, things I didn’t know to ask about. That is what I’m trying to do here. There is a lot of …
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