Back In The Saddle With Demon’s Hex

zacharyDec 3, 2013

I have finally gotten back into my groove with Demon’s Hex. This is after a long while where I decided to take a quick breather and try out some other stuff. Unfortunately, I did not manage to get a game up and running on the Ouya like I had hoped. Many of the snags I hit there had a lot to do with my knowledge of HaxeFlixel. Not that it was anything bad about the technology, it is just that I have not quite figured it out enough to get where I need to be.

So I have taken up Demon’s Hex again and boy did I run into a wall. HaxeFlixel released its version 3 during this brief respite. And with that update came a whole lot of changes to some of the core functionality of Demon’s Hex. There were three big changes that tripped up Demon’s Hex.

The first was with the way to embed a custom font. Demon’s Hex uses a font called Solemnity which gives it that nice look. But with the new update, the ability to add a custom font was removed on accident. Thankfully the fine folks working on HaxeFlixel were able to quickly add that functionality back, although in a very different fashion. I still need to make some tweaks to the display of text as now everything is offset from where it needs to be.

The second problem was with animation. Previously, I was using a function called goToAndStop to run an animation to a specific frame and end the animation. However, the new version of HaxeFlixel uses a very different way of animating sprites and goToAndStop was decommissioned. I had to figure out a custom solution that duplicated the behavior. This is working as needed now.

The final problem was with the glow effect around the tokens when placed on the board. This one was the most difficult to figure out after the change. This was a highly different process from before. It required some extensive rewriting and experimentation to get functioning correctly. I spent many hours working on it. I just finished this up this morning and I am happy with the result.

Overall, I like the changes that were made to HaxeFlixel. The new organization of the class files should make developing games with the technology far easier in the future. I had just not been keeping up with the development of it like I should have been. Had I actually been watching these updates, I probably would have been able to anticipate and account for these changes earlier.

I am now moving one to working on the actual story mode of the game. I think for now the battle portion works as a very close approximation of the final game. So it is time to give other parts of the game the love they deserve.