Week 5 Progress

Proposed Title of the Project

Tile-Based Games in Flash Lite 2.0

Problem Statement

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.

A solution to this problem is a new version of the Flash Player designed specifically for mobile phones and consumer electronic devices called Flash Lite 2.0. This new mobile Flash Player was built on Flash Player 7 technology and utilizes many of the original Flash Player 7 features such as XML data support, Action Script 2.0, and the ability to save information for re-use. (Adobe, 2006) In addition to this new player, the utilization of tile-based worlds, which allow the developer to reuse all graphical assets as well as assemble worlds with code (Makar, 2004), will provide a more efficient and less CPU tasking environment for creating action/adventure/role-playing online games that can be played on both computers and mobile devices.

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 games on the 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 its advantages such as small size and resizability. In simple games this style of game works great, 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. (Tonypa, 2005) 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, 2005) This scenario would be especially devastating in mobile devices such as cell phones, since they don’t have the nearly the amount of processing power as an average personal computer.

Importance or significance of the project

The video game industry is a large and growing industry with an estimated sixty-nine percent of American heads of households claiming to play computer and video games. (ESA, 2006) Within the gaming industry 86% of video gamers own a cell phone and of those individuals 48% play games on their mobile devices. (Davis, 2005) In a survey administered just this year by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) found that forty-four percent of game players play online games (ESA, 2006) With a potential market this large and new technologies such as Flash Lite 2.0 being released, the value of the project would be in creating a game utilizes the added functionality of this new technology and gives the gaming community an idea of what can be created.


Resources:

Adobe. (2006, June 21). Macromedia Flash Lite. Retrieved July24, 2006, from http://www.adobe.com/products/flashlite/

Davis, Ziff. (2005, August 9). Ziff Davis Video Game Survey: Gamers Continue to Cut TV Viewing. Retrieved August 2, 2006, from http://www.ziffdavis.com/press/releases/050809.0.html

Entertainment Software Association (ESA). (2006). Facts & Research. Retrieved July 20, 2006, from http://www.theesa.com/facts/top_10_facts.php

Makar, Jobe and Winiarczyk, Ben. (2004). Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified. Berkeley. Peachpit Press.

My Digital Life. (2006, July 20, 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/

Tonypa.Tony. (2005). Tile Based Games. Retrieved July 11, 2006, from http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/start.html