For the longest time I’ve wanted to make a flash game and just never had to time or will to actually do it, in the last week however, I finally made the time. It’s currently in that 90% done phase but for some reason it seems to take as much time to go from 90% to 95% as it did to go from 0% to 75% – I’ve been knee deep in character animation, tweaking gravity, choosing colors (not an easy task for me btw) and a whole other assortment of other less glamorous tasks. I’ve learned a couple of things from the whole process…
1. I’ve been in the Flex world way too long – I forgot how fun (and frickin convenient) it is to just put code and graphics right on the timeline and never look back. Yeah yeah the action panel in cs4 blows but using Flash and Flex together proves to be a really helpful little workflow.
2. Drawing is easy – animating is hard…and long…and tedious. It’s rewarding when it all comes together but it does take some effort to get there.
3. I had the “This is a great idea” euphoria from the 0% to 30% mark and for a few days there I thought the whole project was going to be a real stinker. I just wanted to stop and throw everything away and move on to something else with much more…well, awesomeness i guess. I kinda forced myself to stick with it though and I broke through the horrible feelings of abandonment that I was having. Amazingly, I actually like playing it now.
4. gotoAndPlay() – oh how I’ve missed you.
5. I originally planned for this thing to take one week, no more. Well, coding a project with a couple of hours late at night doesn’t lead to the fastest development cycle. This week will be more of a polishing and I’ll probably send it out to some friends for them to try it out but Thursday is my deadline. All in all this whole thing would have consumed around 20 hours – probably a little bit much for a flash game but worth it in my opinion.
I think that’s it for now, I’ll write more detailing the actual game and not just my late night ramblings – hope you like the (unfinished) screenshot!