Pew! Pew!

I haven’t yet quite got the basics running yet. I’ve got a gun turret and a crosshair cursor working, but the bullets are still broken. I haven’t yet figured out a good Flash way to implemenet them yet. It’s the memory management aspect that’s the issue. Flash’s Arrays appear to be sparse, which means it’s not straightforward to just delete a bullet, and I haven’t found Flash’s equivalent for a linked list yet. I might have to improvise something out of arrays.

Most of the delays come from my need to get up to speed and my unfamiliarity with Flash. I don’t yet know all the library functions and variables, so I have to look everything up. Occasionally I’ll hit something odd that takes a while to find the right fix.

I’m also a bit hamstrung in that it’s been a while since I’ve written game logic, so I’m trying to remember all those little details like the best way to manage my code and deal with frame rate independent logic. For this project I’ve cut back on the planning and an just piling all the logic into one file, but there’s a few cases where I’ve had to spill out into separate classes (and hence files; ActionScript is a bit like Java that way) for the sake of sanity. It’s not pretty, but it doesn’t need to be pretty.

Oh, and Flash’s drawing tools are a bit crazy. This is a gripe I have with all of Adobe’s tools, actually. I shelled out mad money for Adobe Creative Suite CS3 (well, I saved a bundle by getting an education discount, but it was still expensive), but the tools are some of the least intuitive I’ve used. Each tool seems to have multiple functions, and I don’t get when each one is in effect. I admit I haven’t given these tool enough time to do them justice, but that’s usually because I’ve got a task to complete and if it’s quicker to do it in GIMP, then that’s what I’ll fire up. Which is ironic, because GIMP’s interface is no slouch in the WTF department itself. Inkscape’s the only art tool I feel really at home with.

Back to Project Protos: at this rate, I figure I’ll be up to designing the gameplay today. I haven’t fully decided which direction to take this. The curret art is a placeholder and I don’t know which style I’ll end up using. I’ll probably just knock together something a bit more vector-y in Inkscape and use that; see what works.