Week 6 Progress


Project Description

The proposed solution is to creating a working first level demo of a tile-based adventure game created using Flash Lite 2.0 to show how the utilization of these two technologies can provide a way of developing more efficient and less CPU tasking complex games playable on both computers and mobile devices. The project 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. This game will use 16-bit tiles for the graphics and will be played using a top-down view. A small town and a battleground outside the town will be the two major locations within the game. Inside the town the playable character will be able to talk with a couple of the non-playable characters as well as buy a weapon at a shop in the town. Outside the town will be a battleground in which monsters will attack the character. These monsters will have random items on them such gold and potions. The character and the monsters will have hit points and use a D20 based formula for determining whether their attack hit and for determining damage. To limit this game due to the amount of time allowed, this demo portion will not have the role-playing aspect of the playable character leveling up, but this feature can be added in at a later time. The demo will be outputted into the Flash Lite 2.0 Player with a built-in cell phone emulator that shows how the game will work in the particular models of phones that support the Flash Lite 2.0 technology. The game will then be made available on the web via a link from a blog where people with Flash Lite 2.0 enabled phones will be able to download the demo and make comments as to how it works on their particular phone.

The projected timeline for this project will be the eleven weeks period of the quarter. The first part of project would involve the laying out of where and how everything will appear and interact on paper. After having a firm idea of all the elements needed, the next phase would include the gathering of graphics to be used in the tiles of the game demo. Once all the graphics are collected, Photoshop will be used to place all the graphics into tiles to make up the look of the area map in a large grid as well as the simple animation cycles of the different characters and monsters.

Once the town and battleground are finished in Photoshop, Flash will then be used to create the actual tiles using a rectangular movie clip that contains the graphical area of the map. The movie clip tile will have multiple key frames containing the different graphical elements that make up the finished map created in Photoshop, such as a patch of grass, a rock, pieces of architecture, etc. Once the tile is completed, ActionScript will be used to create multiple instances of the tile movie clip and to place them into a grid. The grid will be fairly large to contain both the town and the battleground and look to be around 100 x 200 square grid.

After the grid is the correct layout, the process of setting the individual frames of the tile instances and whether or not it is passable will begin. For example, 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. (Markar, 2004) This technique allows for great efficiency in the course of recycling the graphical assets.

In the next phase, 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 would then be stored in an external XML file. As soon as the map is complete, the next stage involves placing the playable character on the map and keeping track of where it is. For this, a simple math trick is used that involves dividing the position of the main character by the tile’s width and rounding the number down to the nearest integer. Using this math trick to determine the playable character’s position within the tiles helps to tremendously lighten the processor load verses an older method of looping through the entire grid constantly performing a hitTest();.(Markar, 2004) Once this stage is compete, the final stages will involve adding the additional features that make the demo more complex such as, talking NPC, combat system, animation, monster movement and attacks, shops, etc. After all these features have been hammered out, testing and debugging the demo will commence then finally after all is working, the instructions will be added. The resources that will be used in creating this game include Markar’s Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Game Design Demystified, Tonypa’s web tutorial Tile Based Games, http://charas-project.net/resources.php for game tiles, and Adobe’s developer’s section for Flash Lite 2.0.

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

Koprowski, Gene. (2006, June 10). Mobile Phone Converging With 'Flash,' Other Apps. Retrieved August 13, 2006, from http://www.technewsworld.com/story/51011.html

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/

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

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