Something Wrong with the System

In an effort provide further evidence that I’m still alive and that I still care about this blog I’m posting more old stuff! This time from way back in 2006.

This is a game engine I called Sprocket. Sprocket was my ‘Learn AS2’ project. The code was an absolute mess, but I’m still really proud of the game.

Be sure to check out the cars with working Suspension (jump on them!), the bullet sparks (dynamic!) and the shot gun (use your mouse wheel or the 1 and 2 keys to switch weapons).

I wasn’t the only person to work on this!

The background graphics are by Trevor Goodwin.
The Character Sprites are by Justin Chan.
The Music is by Ragozzino
The title screen is by Marcin Zajkowski

You can see the game in action here

A few weeks ago I started work on a new game as a hobby project… unfortunately I also started playing A LOT of Company of Heroes on the PC, so progress on the programming has been slow, very, very slow.

But I did write at least one useful piece of code that I think some people might find useful:  Level Scrolling.

When I was working on my first Flash 2D platform engine Sprocket (game was never finished).  I found one of the biggest problems was having the level scroll properly.  So this time when I started writing the game engine, scrolling was the first thing  I nailed down.

In Sprocket I found that scrolling with the Character locked in the center of the screen was unsatisfactory as enemies could easily sneak up behind you.  So I developed a system where the mouse controls the user’s view.  I was inspired by the scrolling in PC games such as Abuse, and Soldat.

In my new game I’ve created a LevelDisplay class which handles all scrolling work automatically. Just tell the LevelDisplay what game sprite to focus on and it will handle the rest.

Keep in mind all of this code is very early, so please don’t just plonk this in your game.  Once I’ve built an actual game I’ll have a better idea of how successful my implementation actually is.  But for now I’ll share what I have and maybe you can get some use out of it.

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Back in 2004 I worked on a game called ‘The Lander’ it was eventually licensed by Miniclip.com and ArcadeTown.com (for not very much money at all).

‘The Lander’ is the project that convinced me that maybe I should continue working in Flash and ActionScript.

Anyway.  For the past 5 years ‘The Lander’ was hosted by my friend Mario Tan (this is back from the time when I was too poor to afford web hosting).  Mario’s hosting has finally expired, so I’m hosting it myself.

WARNING: This game is old (written in Flash 6!) and super buggy.     It is not an indicator of my current skill set!

You can play the game here http://www.organa.ca/Lander/