This beautiful lady and i said ‘I do’ on August 12th in New Hope, PA. On August 13th we set out for Alaska.

Needless to say, i haven’t been around a computer for two weeks… looking forward to coding with a ring on.

After i brought those old Game&Watch handhelds home, i started playing them heavily. After being beat into submission hundreds of times i began thinking ‘these games are too damn hard’ – so i put them down and decided to try and recreate one in Actionscript3… here’s the first one i came out with – a remake of Donkey Kong Jr from the widescreen Game&Watch series.

With the previous games i have worked on, i employed a pixel collision detection system to drive game play- but when thinking about LCD games, spaces on the screen are reserved and there is no real overlap of pixels to detected when an enemy runs into a hero, an enemy connects with a projectile, etc. Instead i had to employ a sort-of ‘mother may i’ management system where a call is made from every ‘object’ prior to it’s bitmap update to see if anything is in between where what block it’s in and what block needs to be rendered next. The development was based mainly on Passive Matrix LCDs.

Ultimately how it is put together is by loading a graphics sheet with all the states for each ‘player’ and then basing it’s rendered state upon game interaction and a list of state ‘matrices’. On each ‘allowance’ of movement the bitmapdata is cleared and redrawn with a new state. And in the case of the enemies, based on your progression through the game, the ‘allowance’ timing is sped up.

The biggest thing i have gained from working this through is the beauty of the new Timer class. With the introduction of BitmapData in Flash8 As2 i began rethinking how i was developing, and now with the Timer class i’m doing it again. I loved onEnterFrame for so long, but that just wasn’t gonna hack it for this project… and i’m glad it didn’t.

I kept the architecture pretty open for easy adaptation and extension so that i could make more of these LCD games with ease, but i think i have to step away for a bit. Sound would be a good addition to this and i plan to do a little work on that, but i’m getting pretty busy.
Enough talk, enjoy the game and keep in mind that this is a rough prototype, so you may encounter a bug or two

Here’s a little example of what i’ve progressed to since i went down the path of changing my thought process of what a user-controlled sprite is.
Hit the block to produce a bonus ( or the hammer-fountain ) and collect the bonus by running into it. You can become big, a racoon or a frog. When you’re the racoon, once you reach max acceleration, the screen will display “tap spacebar” – tap that spacebar fast and you’ll be able to fly.

What’s happening:
My implementation of a user-controlled sprite has been reduced to a simple particle with a display movieclip inside and reacts to key controls. Upon pixel collision of a “bonus” not of current sprite type, the display bitmap is updated with a different graphics source, and the sprite model is changed accordingly.
Each sprite model has a set of behaviors that respond to key controls – and in the case of the racoon, those behaviors are switch out on recognition of maximum acceleration; meaning you can fly if you tap the space bar fast enough once you are at max speed. Another neat thing is that the Fly Behavior is on a timer, so after about 5 seconds, it’s switched back to your previous behavior. The frog is interesting to see the difference in behaviors – when you move left or right, the hop behavior is called, as opposed to the basic roam ( or walk/run ) behavior of the others.

I’m also employing the particle sytem structure i had before, and switch action policies based on whether the sprite is “hurt” or not. A visual clue to let you know that the sprite responds to key controls again is once the stars start falling and turning red.

I think this is going to be the last in my Flash8 experiments of sprites and effects, and start porting what i have over to AS3- cleaning and documenting as i go. Hopefully i’ll have something up soon, but seeing as i’m a newly proud owner of a DS, my productiveness may wane for a bit

[Edit 9-16-05(i have removed the wonderful comments... the rain today aggrevated the old leg-bender)]