Aspiring Game Programmer Extraordinaire

Game jam game, April 2010

Flash

Summary

Ablative Starfighter was a flash game I created with Ed Dubois on April 17th and 18th, 2010 for the WPI Game Development Club, 38 Studios, Flixel Game Jam. It was created in Flash using the Flixel framework in the FlashDevelop IDE.  I did the programming, while Ed did the art, sound effects, and concept creation.  This description was pulled verbatim from Ed’s blogpost about the game:

The theme for this Game Jam was the Seven Deadly Sins, and I felt that my ideas for Ablative Starfighter could suit both Greed and Gluttony quite well.

Made in Flixel, this version of Ablative Starfighter is a bit different from the envisioned format of a veritcal shooter, instead being in the style of geometry wars. But the principle I feel applies to any sort of shooter. Basically your ship can upgrade itself to fight enemies, but with every upgrade it acquires, the ship becomes slower both in speed and maneuvering. Essentially this is where the greed and the gluttony come in, since you can weigh yourself down with upgrades and damage tank, but you’ll be more susceptible to actually getting hit. However, it’s a two-way street. You can purge upgrades as your bomb-type weapon, freeing yourself up at the cost of armor or weaponry. For this version we stuck with 6 upgrades, alternating a weapon and armor upgrade for each tier, and limited the number of enemies you face before taking on our boss, Munch of 38 Studios (they were one of the sponsors of the Game Jam). You can play the game at Graham’s WPI-hosted webspace here. It’s more in a demonstration phase since you only fight a small number of enemies before the boss and then the game ends (the boss also having an insane number of hitpoints). At some point Graham and I will probably turn it into a more full-fledged experience with more enemy types and so forth.

My role and lessons learned

I programmed the entire game in ActionScript 3 using the Flixel framework.  This was not only my first Flixel game, but my first Flash game.  I found Flash and Flixel a great framework for game prototyping and rapid development, making it perfect for game jams.  I often found myself over-thinking and over-engineering certain technical aspects of the game when in reality, Flixel does most (if not all) of this “heavy lifting” for you.  For example, when implementing the player ship movement, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that I needed to use vectors and forces to calculate accelerations.  Since flixel doesn’t have an explicit vector math library, I decided to do some googling to see how other people accomplished this.  I quickly found that Flixel had a build in method for “asteroids-style” ship movement.  Overall this game has shown me that having the right tools is the best recipe for success when creating rapid prototypes.  Being comfortable using your tools and knowing how to accomplish tasks within their context are the most important skills to have when prototyping.

Play

(WARNING: Sound is quite loud.  You have been warned .)

Play in a new window