Jeff Price
Senior Project
Tuesday 8am
Project Proposal Outline
Project Title: Tile-Based Flash Games
Problem Statement:
1. The problem to solve is how to create more efficient and less CPU tasking action/adventure/role-playing online games that can be played on both computers and mobile devices. The group of people that are going to benefit from the solution is forty-four percent of game players who play online games and the 32 percent of heads of households that play games on a wireless device, according to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA).
2. Currently most online video games on sites like www.pogo.com, games.yahoo.com, zone.msn.com, games.aol.com, and www.freeonlinegames.com provide vast amounts of simple or casual style games (casual style games referring to easy-to learn one-player or easy going multi-player games that can be played for five minutes or five hours, for example a simple card, puzzle, or trivia game) created in Flash. (My Digital Life, 2006) Many of online gaming sites mentioned above use art based style games in their action/adventure/role-playing category. Art based games created in flash solely using vectors have small size and are resizable. This style of game works great for simple games, but when it comes to creating more complex games that involve a larger map areas as well as larger amounts of added features, the game can have a tendency to slow down. It is also a good idea when creating tile-based games to use bitmap images as the graphical elements in the tiles. Even though the tile-based world in the game could use vector graphics, when the Flash player runs the game it has to calculate all the vectors on screen, which could slow down the game. (Tonypa, 2003/2004/2005)
In a tile-based game created in Flash, a tile usually consists of a rectangular movie clip that contains a graphical area of a map. This movie clip tile can have any number of frames that contain a graphic element of the map such as a patch of grass, a rock, pieces of architecture, etc. These tiles are then laid out in a grid; lets say ten-by-ten square grid for example, using Actionscript and XML. If frame 1 of the tiled movie clip contains a patch of grass and the entire grid was showing the tile on frame one, then the entire grid would look like a large patch of grass. By setting the instances of the tiles to different frame numbers that contained the different graphical elements, the grid would then start to look more like a map. This in turn allows for great efficiency in the course of recycling the graphical assets. Next, all of the tile positions and frame numbers as well as information about the tile are stored into a two-dimensional array as objects, which could then be stored in an external file such as XML. One of the ways that tile-base worlds in Flash help to lighten the load of the CPU is through using a simple math trick to determine which tile the main character in. This math trick involves dividing the position of the main character by the tile’s width and rounding the number down to the nearest integer. (Markar, 2004) Creating an isometric view, path finding, and depth sorting are also a few things that are easier to accomplish in tile-based games. (Tonypa, 2003/2004/2005) Utilizing these types techniques through a tile base-world can be extremely advantageous, especially when working with mobile devices, such as cell phones and PDAs, that don’t have the CPU power of an average computer system.
Online and mobile video game businesses would be able to use this technology to add depth to the games they currently have as well as drawn in the additional 22.0% of the market that play Action/Sports/Stragety/Role-Play games most often, according to the ESA.
Technologies you want to work with:
1. The concept for tiles in games has been around since the early days of computers and video game consoles. In a time before computers had speeds of GHz and hundred of MB of memory. With the number of gamers who play video games online increasing by 31% from 2002 and the number of gamers who play games from mobile devices increasing by 20% from 2002 (ESA, 2006), the same conditions are starting to become an issue with today’s Internet and mobile game developers. The development of Flash Lite 2.0 was built on Flash 7 technology, which allows actionscript 2.0 as well as XML to be used (Adobe 2006, June 21) making it more appealing to create more complex games utilizing tile-based worlds.
2. My technologies of choice include the Windows platform for development purposes. Actionscript and XML will be the choice as far as programming languages are concerned. The Authoring application chosen for this project will be Flash 8 with the Flash Lite 2.0 authoring update.
Flash Lite 2.0 also comes with the Flash Lite 2.0 Player, which emulates the type of mobile device the game is designed for allowing the developer to test the virtual phone’s buttons to see if the game is working properly.
Draft Project Plan
A rough layout of my project schedule would start off with the game concept being planned out on paper. The project would be the first level of a scrolling adventure style game that would show how the tile-based world handles character interaction with npc (non-player characters), collision detection, and other functions commonly found adventure style games. After laying out everything on paper as to how the game will look and work, the next phase would include gathering up the graphics and creating the tiles for the actual game. After using the tiles in Photoshop to come up with what the moveable area of the game will look like, I would then use XML to position the tiles. When the main background of the game is finished and loads correctly in Flash using XML, the next phase would be creating the character tiles and animation sequences. Then when all the graphics of the game are ready, the long process of writing the game engine in Actionscript will commence. Testing and debugging stages will take place after that, then the navigation pages and instructions will probably end up being the last phase of the project.
Resources:
Adobe. (2006, June 21st). Macromedia Flash Lite. Retrieved July24, 2006, from http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/
Entertainment Software Association (ESA). (2006). Facts & Research. Retrieved July 20, 2006, from http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php
My Digital Life. (2006, July 20th, Thursday) at 10:40 pm. Free Online ‘Casual’ and Brain Teasing Computer Games. Retrieved July 23, 2006, from http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/07/20/free-online-casual-and-brain-teasing-computer-games/
Makar, Jobe and Winiarczyk, Ben. (2004). Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified. Berkeley. Peachpit Press.
Tonypa.Tony. (2003 / 2004 / 2005). Tile Based Games. Retrieved July 11, 2006, from http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/start.html
