Source code for Arena for sale

A few people expressed an interest in how I created the game Arena. It's been a while since it was released so I decided to put the source up for sale. What you will get is the full source code to the game without the sponsors bit since I don't own that code and you can do what you like with it. It actually contains a flash engine that could be used to write further games if you want.

You can visit www.xiotexstudios.com or:

Arena is finished!

I finally finished Arena and it got sponsored!

you can check it out at here

It's not on general release yet and the above link is site locked so it wont be spread anywhere as my sponsor wants to wait a while before releasing it generally.

This is my second game in Actionscript 3 and my first to use a totally bitmap approach to developing in flash. The game only uses one timeline element and this is the initial sprite object that is the container for the main bitmap.

Everything in Arena apart from the background image in the main game which was kindly made for me by Dugan, Art director of Coyote Console. One aspect of this game that is also totally new for me is that I did all the audio as well. The music you can hear is me playing live on my keyboards using motion synth presets. My audio equipment has expanded since I started it now consists of:

hardware:
Korg Karma
Korg Kaoss Pad 3
Korg MicroKontrol
Roland SH201
Roland Sonic Cell
Roland MV-8800 production studio
Native Instruments Kore

Software:
Logic Studio 8
Reason 4
Native Instruments Komplete 4 & 5
Sample Logic A.I.R.

Been a while

It's been a while since I posted here. Things have been busy. Survival Factor has been played 8000+ times now and was accepted into the Mochi-ads beta so has also been earning money.

SF Extreme was put on hold because I wanted to try out something new. The new game is called 'Arena' and is rapidly approaching Alpha stage. I must admit with this game I am truly amazed with what AS3 allows me to do in Flash these days.

Once this game has been finished and is online I will resume the spreading of AS3 knowledge - for practice I am teaching a producer from Sky games the basics of flash next week so I will use the basis of that lesson here.

Watch this space.

Survival Factor Extreme

After a bit of nagging from Cliffski and a couple of others I have finally given in and started to work on Survival Factor Extreme. This version contains graphics (not metallic grey) and music!

To go along with this makeover I am giving the website a makeover and will be creating a deluxe version of the game that you can buy.

On plus side there have been 2500+ plays of the game since it was released in the form it currently is...

Talking to PHP from Flash CS3

I can't get over how easy it is to submit stuff to a PHP page from flash now:


var url:String = "http://www.somewebsite.com/page.php";
var request:URLRequest = new URLRequest(url);
sendToURL(request);


I will post a little later about how to include parameters in the mix but for now thats as simple as it gets.

My first Flash CS3 game

My first game using Flash CS3 is finally out. You can find it at:

http://www.xiotex.com

I have written a game using the previous version of flash and I must admit that using Flash CS3 was a far more rewarding experience in terms of development time and productivity. AS3 and the compiler is much better at trapping errors and actually telling you what they are.

However, one flaw to using the document class method means that I can't easily create an initial loading bar for the entire game - I have to wrap it up in another 'loader' swf. This is an extra hassle that I will have to tackle at some point.

But at least the game is up - let me know what you think!

Why no destructors?

It's nice that we have constructors in Actionscript but I have just come across a situation where destructors would have been nice too.

Because of the realities of garbage collection it appears that if you attach an event listener to an object and then clear that object for garbage collection the event listener is still active until the garbage collector kicks in and really kills the object. This means that when clearing an object we need to go through all of its event listeners and kill them manually otherwise they will still run. This might not seem much of an issue but consider onEnterFrame which will continue to run, have enough of these running and eventually your system will crawl to a halt.

I don't really mind all of this because personally I prefer to have clean up code but some of this could have been mitigated with basic destructor capabilities built into the language - but that then means that Actionscript would need explicit delete as well...

So - remember to clean up after yourself!