Game Developments Thoughts

I haven't updated here in a while I've recently been busy with my current employer developing a casual video game for the PC market. A lot of details are NDA so I'll try and keep that info from landing on here.

Suffice to say after several tech considerations we decided that the most appropriate platform (read not best) would be flash with action script 3.

In the last month I've been plagued with flash surprises that just astound me. For one flash is the only language that when you add an object that's already on the stage to another container that's also on the stage the original reference disappears from the first container?! This is a bit of an oversight since you will no longer be able to do instancing. Worse still there's no built in .clone operation for display objects so you'll have to start writing your own workarounds for this. Again oversight.

Performance wise we've been discovering flash isn't great for example one effect we wanted to do is a full screen lens blur. To make the CPU requirements low we decided we were just going to pre-process a blurred version of the image and alpha blend the clear version into the blurred one... Guess what full screen alpha blending with 2 images on flash is painfully slow and we had to ditch the idea, in favor of a static staged blend animation.

Progress on this project is pretty good everything is on schedule I'll be throwing in more of the art assets this week. The game is starting to finally look right moving past just a mechanical place holder and starting to take the final form of the game.

There's a lot of "what flash doesn't have this?" that I've been collecting I'm going to see if I can post some here and discuss why it feels like an oversight.