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 dynamic looking 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. Many of online gaming sites mentioned above have weak examples of more complex style games such as those in the action/adventure/role-playing category. Using Tile-Based worlds in these styles of video games can make the game creation process more efficient as well as lighten the load on the CPU. This is especially important in mobile devices such as cell phones and PDA devices that don’t have anything close to the CPU power of the 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. A positive aspect of using Tile-Based worlds in Flash games allow the web and mobile devices that can use the upcoming Flash lite 2.0 technology will be able to recreate or improve upon many of the classic SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) and Sega Genesis style side scrolling games. Tile-based games also use bitmaps over vectors, which in turn task the processor less.
Technologies you want to work with:
1. Tile-based games have been around since the early days of the video game console and are not limited to the use of Flash.
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. As far as other devices go, I would like to test out the game on a Flash lite 2.0 enabled phone, but I don’t think they exist yet and there the part about not having $300 or more to spend on a phone to test out a game.
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:
Entertainment Software Assiociation. 2006 ESA. http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php
Free Online ‘Casual’ and Brain Teasing Computer Games. Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 10:40 pm. http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/07/20/free-online-casual-and-brain-teasing-computer-games/
Makar, Jobe and Winiarczyk, Ben. 2004 Marcromedia Press. Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified.
Tonypa.Tony / 2003 / 2004 / 2005. Tile Based Games.
http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/start.html
1 comment:
Jeff, some good planning here, but also some assumptions being made that will require you to find the research to back it up. I have printed your document and will have notes on it for you or will email the notes.
You state that the problem to solve is that there are not enough or not "dynamic looking" games in three categories - action/adventure/role-playing online and mobile versions. That is a lot to tackle, and it needs some clarifying. Later in you defense of why this problem is important you bring out that tile-based games will "make [the] game creation process more efficient as well as lighten the load on the cpu". Yet you also state that tile=based games have been around since the early days of the video game console. So, why has this technology not be used for the purposes you claim to be better than the way they are currently being used?
You also mention that a yet to be released technology, Flash lite 2.0 will be used? How can you use what does not yet exist?
And you need to test your project on a mobile device yet do not have one of your own - so what is your backup plan for testing? Can you find someone else with a phone? Can you deliver a game to a phone without going throuht a delivery system?
These types of inconsistencies have to be ironed out in order to make this research valid. You cannot just state that something is so- you must back it up with others who have stated this and applied it.
So far, I sense that you have a really good idea, but you need to back up your ideas with more facts - research. The loop-holes here must be unraveled and dealt with.
We'll discuss this more this week, and I'll get a more complete review to you shortly.
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