With the closing of Metaplace a lot of its users are now asking themselves "where to now?". Some are looking for another social hangout, others, like myself are thinking more about game development environments. There has been a lot of talk about Unity 3D, which I've been meaning to have a look at for a while, but first I think I'm going to try out Flash... again (although to be pedantic it'll be Flex).

After my 'success' of creating That Falling Block Game on Metaplace (okay, okay, I'll finally admit it... It's TETRIS!), and buoyed by the success stories of others, I thought I could try my hand at creating a real flash game rather than trying to contort a virtual world platform into one. So last summer, after finally figuring out you could create flash apps for free with the command line flex compiler (therefore avoiding the need to spend hundreds on the Flash development program) I started to make a flash game!

Adventures in Actionscript
The scripting language, ActionScript, had changed a bit since I had last played around with it, so I used this great tutorial for making games in flex to get myself up to speed (since AS is from the same family as JavaScript it wasn't too hard to get in to).

I had decided to try and make a Peggle like hit-the-targets-with-the-bouncing-ball game, just without gravity. That was probably my first mistake; wrangling with physics while trying to learn the ins and outs of a platform is probably not the best idea. My second, and most likely biggest, mistake was to write all that physics interaction myself, rather than use a 3rd party library. It seemed a somewhat reasonable decision; there was only going to be one moving object, with everything it could collide with being stationary (walls, circles and slingshotting around black holes). I had worked on this game on and off over three months of the summer and most of that time was spent trying to get one ball to bounce correctly off those various surfaces, or ensuring that it would bounce at all and not just pass through the object.

Ultimately it was never finished. The last version of the game was complied on the 27th of August, full of debug code...

The aim of the game was:

• Hit each of the targets in sequence. There could be up to eight, where they were coloured red, orange, yellow, etc. Each time you hit the next in the sequence it played a musical note on a scale.
  
• The player first places the ball within a small starting area and then aims where to shoot the ball (fine-aim with mouse-wheel or x/c). From then on the player has no control as the ball bounces around the level, hitting targets and traps.
  
• You started out with 3 hit-points. Each time you hit the next in the sequence you got an extra hit-point. Each time you hit some spikes you lost a hit point.
  
• When you got to 0 hp the level reset.
  
• Getting too close to a black-hole and falling in would reset the level.
  
• If you have more than 3 hp you could spend 3 hp to stop the ball in its tracks so that you could re-aim without resetting the level (single-click while ball is moving).
  
• When aiming you could increase or decrease the length of the aiming guide line (up or down keys), which would have modified the amount of points you could get (the longer the line the fewer points you would would get during the level)
  
• For each level there would be at least one way to aim the ball in such a way that you could hit each target without losing any hit-points (a perfect completion)

Those last two were what probably lead to me dropping the project (or at least turning a break into an indefinite break). Although there were still some annoying collision bugs to iron out, most had been taken care of and I was beginning to move on to actually creating levels. I hadn't made a level editor, instead defining the levels in text files as a list of objects and their positions and orientations. This is what originally lead to the extendible aim guide in order to try and find at least one perfect route per level. It was a rather clumsy way to go about building a level; I'd enter an object into the text file, recompile the flash movie, play the level to see how it interacts with the path of the ball, make adjustments in the text file etc. etc., all the while the aim guide was buggy in its own collision detection.

Luckily before I got too far in this mind numbing process I noticed something odd about how the ball would bounce off the circular targets. A small difference in the approach trajectory of the ball to a circular target made a larger difference in the departing trajectory. When trying to aim the ball so it would hit multiple circular targets in succession, a tiny initial fine-tuning in aim resulted in a massive difference in the path after a few bounces. Whether this is just a property of collisions between circles or as a result of my code, it would have taken the only form of skill and control away from the player, leaving them with just a shoot and hope strategy, as well as making an already painful level creation process near impossible.

I decided to put it all aside for a while, but then never revisited it to find the actual cause.

Back to square one
With my impending post-Metaplace attempt at entering the flash game scene, I hope I'll have learnt the lessons of my previous effort and start out with something a bit less chaotic. A bit more mundane. Like a colour-matching game!
It was in the middle of my 3,487th game of spider solitaire (on medium I must admit) that I thought 'I could turn this into a simple match-5 game, with coloured shapes in place of suited cards!'

So come January 2nd that shall be my task, and I give myself... oh, lets say two weeks to get it done!