Tag Archive for 'flash'

Hoppin’pop

Published on November 24, 2008 in ActionScript, Animation and Check this!. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Isn’t it just great when you are full of exiting ideas and you hands are itching to get started but then your hands also start to itch because of RSI :( I had that problem a few months ago, but now I’m up and running again and started of with a nice game: http://games.justgreat.nl/games/hoppinpop

I made this game in collaboration with a colleague of mine (Berthjan Achterop / http://www.berthjan.com/)
I started of with the coding of the engine and Berthjan made the design. After applying the design to the game I animated most of the characters to bring it all to live. The result is a “colums”-like game wrapped in a world of weird (but wonderful) creatures ;)

Enjoy and let me know what you think of it…

PS: here is a nice wallpaper to accompany the game :D

Hoppin\'pop wallpaper

Jolly jellyfish turning Away3D

Published on June 17, 2008 in ActionScript and Power-up Media. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

justGREAT how jolly my jellyfish look in 3D :D

After over a year of not listening to my nagging collegua (Away3D-team member Fabrice Closier) telling me to start working with (Away)3D, I caved… :P
I started to experiment a little in Away3D and turned my 2D jellyfish experiment into a 3D version. You can watch the result here: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080603.htm

I added a couple of tricks I learned way back when I created levels for Unreal Tournament.
For example I added a second viewport for the skybox (in this case a sphere), because the Away3D Skybox-class is in fact not a real skybox but just a really huge cube rendered in the same viewport as the rest of the scene.
The camera in my skybox viewport points in the same direction as the camera in the main viewport but always stays at point (0,0,0). This way the camera will never approach the side of the skybox, giving the illusion that everything in this viewport is really far away.

All-in-all a good start in Away3D if you ask me. I hope to do some real projects with 3D in the comming weeks…

MouseEvent.ROLL_OUT troubles

Published on March 26, 2008 in ActionScript and Power-up Media. 11 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Just great :( Just when I thought I mastered the MouseEvents in as3 (after trying almost every combination of MouseEvents, buttonMode and mouseChildren) I found a new problem situation; only this time I can seem to find a solution.

The situation looks like this:
If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it's missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe.

- The two shapes are siblings so they have the same parent (i.o.w. the two shapes can’t be nested).
- The blue oval is on top of the green rectangle.
- I want to know when the mouse leaves the green rectangle.

The problem is that the green rectangle dispatches a ROLL_OUT and MOUSE_OUT event as soon as the mouse hits the blue oval.

I tried all combinations of mouseChildren, buttonMode and enabled on the oval and on the parent of the two clips, but nothing seems to make the oval not “steal focus” of the rectangle.

Here is the source of the test: Rollout test (zip)

I can think of some workarounds (hitArea, using an invisible button, etc.) but I much rather find a straight way to handle this kind of situation.
Since this was never a problem in as2 I believe there should be a decent solution in as3 as well.

If someone has an answer to this problem or knows about a secret property I haven’t tried, please let me know…

Game tiles experiment

Published on March 25, 2008 in ActionScript, Graphics and Power-up Media. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

justGREAT! I start off designing some tiles just for practice and one day later I end up with a neat experiment :D

I was inspired by the graphics of Dofus Arena and decided to try and create some similar tiles… Spending half a day fooling around with Fireworks I ended up with this image:

game tiles

Another half a day later I turned the graphics into an animated terrain generator: http://labs.justgreat.nl/exp080302.htm

The terrain is generated according to three small bitmaps (see top left corner). The first one determines the type of the tile. The second one is like a bumpmap and determines the elevation of eacht tile. The third bitmap determines where objects (plants, rocks, gold, etc.) should be placed.
In the future I might create an editor which can write the bitmaps.

Once I designed more versions of each tile-type (4 or 5 different grass tiles for example) the generator will be able to pick a random version of that tile. This way repetition in the structure should be avoided (at the moment the tiles are just mirrored at random).

Jolly jellyfish

Published on March 21, 2008 in ActionScript, Animation, Graphics and Power-up Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

At the moment I’m trying to learn how to make timeline animations in Flash and yet somehow I end up animation which is 80% coded, isn’t that just great!?

Just fooling around I came up with this result:
If you can see this, then you might need a Flash Player upgrade or you need to install Flash Player if it's missing. Get Flash Player from Adobe.
Jolly jellyfish - vector animation | download

The movement and generation of the jellyfish is all actionscript (2.0), the “squezing” is timeline-animation…

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