The first part of the tutorial is now ready for your viewing. This part of the tutorial covers setting up the basic structure of the game, adding the player, adding an enemy, and letting the player shoot the enemy. Very basic so far, but there’s more to come. Stay tuned for part 2 where we’ll begin adding a little flair to our game.
The next tutorial I am preparing is going to be a replacement for my older extension of Andreas Zecher’s tutorial. There are two very important reasons as to why this tutorial must be redone: One, the original was not optimized, not programmed with speed in mind if you will; and two, I need the tutorial to be compatible with Flixel 2.5 so that there’s actually one available, which was also a problem after Flixel 2 was released… which is when I started learning Flixel. I don’t want others not having something up to date to learn from like I did.
The Flixel Hello World Tutorial is now available! Find it here!
In order to give back to the community, I’ve begun writing up tutorials for Flixel (I’d done one in the past, which will be redone). I could think of no better place to start than the beginning. You can check out the Getting Started tutorial that will show you how to get FlashDevelop set up, where to get the Flex SDK and Flash Player Content Debugger, and make them play nice.
Next up will be a Hello World tutorial because you just HAVE to have one of those. Haha. I’ll be slowly adding more tutorials for your viewing pleasure so stay tuned.
The end of the year is almost here and distractions are a plenty. Well, distractions in my life are always a plenty, which is why I rarely post anything. A few weeks back, using the knowledge I’d gained from tinkering with Flixel, I started work on what is to become my first real game. I chose a simple (and quite overly populated) genre: the shoot ’em up.
The ground work of the game went together fairly quickly: Basic menus, player movement and firing, enemies spawning and attacking, damage and death, lives and game over, particle emitters for hits, the heads up display, and more.
I knew I had to optimize things a little bit or the game would eventually lag to complete halt. Rather than having new shots, enemies, emitters created over and over, which is a big no-no, I only have them created if absolutely necessary; dead sprites are recycled otherwise. This will help keep the memory usage lower and not lag the game so much.
Long story short though, I haven’t worked on it very much because of those distractions I was talking about. But I’m now back in action as of yesterday and am going to be working to get more of this game put together so that it can eventually see the light of day.
My next goal is to get the player’s weapon energy system implemented as well as other powerups, like lives and ammo.
Boy, it’s certainly been awhile since my last post. Here’s a quick update. I’ve been continuing my search for Flixel / Actionscript knowledge; reading forums, code snippets, etc, all the while compiling what I’ve learned into a simple platformer demo. Most of the graphics in it were created by me (except those coins), though the player is a placeholder (obviously). You can move around with the arrow keys and jump with X. Grab ledges simply by falling into them, and then press up to climb up or down to let go of the ledge. You can also climb on the ceilings by holding X. Hop on enemies to defeat them and grab the key to open the door.
I’ve been using DAME (Deadly Alien Map Editor – http://dambots.com/dame-editor/) by Charles Goatley to create the levels and the graphics were created using GraphicsGale (http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/). Yeah, there’s some problems, like the 2 levels being completely fresh when you enter them, but that’s just because the way I have it coded. Overall, I’ve learned a lot and will most certainly apply it to an actual project in the future. For now, check out the demo.
I found a code snippet for adding a starfield in Flixel and added it into the mix. The stars look great but not on a green colored background, so I had to change that to black, making everything else stand out like a sore thumb. So I’ve done a little palette reworking for the tutorial and I must say, it has improved the look of it 100 percent. Check it out.
Source available on Github
The HUD has been added and it looks great. I’ve written up a second part to the tutorial extension for your learning pleasure. Check it out here: https://omegastorm.wordpress.com/archives/flash/flixel-tutorials/flixel-2-te-part-2/
Source available on Github
In the Flixel Primer tutorial, the only HUD element that was added was a score counter that ticked up as you destroyed enemies, but I’m currently working on adding a few more elements to it; namely health and powerup indicators.
Currently, in my upgraded version of the tutorial, there is no way for the player to know what powerup he or she has unless she fires the ships weapon, but this new HUD addition will not only show the player what kind of powerup he/she has but also how many of that powerup. In addition to the powerup indicator, the player will have a health bar and be able to take more than one hit (because it would just be silly to have a health bar and still die with one hit).
I’ll have the changes posted as soon as I finish them and will write up a part 2 to my extended tutorial.
Here’s a look at the Flixel 2 tutorial (from http://www.creativeapplications.net/flash/flixel-2-tutorial-flash-tutorials-games/) with my powerup and weapon additions. I finished adding the third weapon and though it’s not quite the way I originally envisioned it, I’m pretty happy with the results. I also corrected a few issues I came upon as well. I’ll be writing up a tutorial to show you how I went about adding these additions soon, but for now, check out the different weapon effects.
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