Slow And Steady: Game Development Plodding Along
Game development is plodding along. Certainly, not a fast as I would like it to be. I have been trying to work in as many hours as possible into the game as I can (I hate to make excuses) but between my full time job and my family, some things just have to take a back seat. But there is some progress. There are also a number of problems.
I have been trying to get the tokens in the game to load in dynamically. I want to be able to add new tokens to the game without the need to recompile whenever I do. So I have implemented a call back to the server to request all the tokens in the player’s inventory. Things are working fairly well for this, but I am hitting some issues.
First among the issues was Flixel’s lack of native support for loaded graphics. Flixel was designed to work most efficiently with embedded graphics so I had to extend FlxSprite to implement support for loaded graphics. With that out of the way I hit a couple of other issues. You can see an example of them in the following snap shot:
There are a few things wrong here, but one that is probably more noticeable to an outside viewer. You can see all the white stuff around the images. For some reason, when I load the images from the server, I get a lot of white around and over the graphics. It was a lot worse before I switch everything but the character art to use embedded images. I don’t think this is a problem with Flixel as I have seen something similar with other games. It may be a problem with Flash running on my Linux development computer. I remember being able to fix it before, but can’t remember exactly what I did. Since Flash has been upgraded as well, I don’t think that fix would work with this version. I still need to test this on another computer.
The second issue here is that of the character images stacking on top of each other. This one is a little more frustrating and seems to have more to do with the fact that Flash is loading them way to fast for it to render properly. I think I can get rid of this issue by using a utility called LoaderMax to help me load them up correctly and before I add them to the tokens. Again, I also had this issue with the sword and shield icons as well when I was loading them from the server rather than embedding them into the swf object.
The final issue is that of the big fat zero for the attack (and nothing for the defense). Each of these tokens have an attack and defense value that is a positive number. But for some reason that value is not making it from the database to the game. It might be an issue with the xml file created or the conversion from a string to an int back to a string. I am not sure yet.
So that is the major news for now. I wanted to let you know that, yes, we are working on the game. I plan on having something playable before Indiecade. It is a prerequisite for me. I am not going to go there with nothing to show those in attendance. It will make it.
Thank you again for your time. If you are interested in making a financial contribution toward getting this game made (so that I can devote some extra time towards it) I wrote about some ways you can do that on my personal blog.
