An informal survey of some of my Flash programmer buddies revealed what I’m sure you’ll agree is the most silly programmer error that we’ve all made at some point in our lives (usually many times over). It is such a trivially silly mistake that I managed to successfully do it on two different projects this year. By highlighting it here I am trying to reinforce it to the point that I never do it again. My name is Panayoti Haritatos, and I like to convert Strings into Booleans. Continue Reading »

Now is a great time to be an ActionScript programmer! Over the last few years, several tools have emerged as essential to developing for the Flash platform, and the great news is that many of these tools are free. As of June 8th, 2008, these 10 FREE tools are the ones I consider the most essential for any ActionScript programmer. Continue Reading »

Making a preloader is the epitome of game development suck as far as I am concerned. Usually you are implementing them at the end of the development schedule when you are are sick and tired of looking at this game that you have spent so much time on already. Now you have to figure out how to massage all your assets magically across a few frames for people with slow internet connections when all you want to do is kick the darn thing out the door and be done with it. There are umptillion tutorials out there on how to create a preloader in the Flash IDE. Flex has a pretty snazzy built in preloader. Are we screwed because we’re going with a pure Actionscript 3.0 project? As it turns out, you can get a customizable AS3 only preloader with almost no effort at all. Continue Reading »

I am going to be heading out of town for the next week or so. Tomorrow’s post will go live as always, and if I find some time this afternoon I will put together something for next week. If not, I will take care of that and any comments as soon as I return. Have a great week!

Flash 8 marked the introduction of the scale9grid. UI writing was about to become substantially easier, because you could create components that resized dynamically and maintained their artistic integrity at all sizes. This was to usher in a new era of sexy UIs that were built in less time. In theory. In practice, the implementation was, and still is, buggy. Oh, and it only works for MovieClips. You can kinda get it working in Flex using yet another embed tag you’ll forget about as soon as you’re done copy pasting it from some reference site. Here’s a scale9 implementation that actually works. Continue Reading »

Very few games can escape the need for an Entity framework. An Entity framework defines the core pieces of interactivity for your game. Over the years, I have implemented and reimplemented Entity frameworks dozens of times. In the interests of easing the development process and providing stable libraries on which to rapidly build games (rather than simply create technology), I introduce the following Entity framework that will become the foundation of more advanced topics in game engine development. Continue Reading »

One of the sure fire signs of an amateur game developer is a badly thought out control scheme. Seemingly minor decisions can drastically alter the gameplay experience. Be deliberate in your control choices, as it is one of the most fundamental reasons for creating a frustrated and dissatisfying gameplay experience. Continue Reading »

But…… Commenting algorithms and APIs is not. If you’re writing good code, the code comments itself. If you look at some code and can’t tell what it is doing by reading the code, then chances are you’ve been doing a piss-poor job of some basic coding best practices, like naming variables based on what they are, functions by what they do and classes by their responsibility. When you write code you should strive to write code that comments itself. Once you realize that code can be self-commenting, you realize that there are some cases where self-commenting code does not give you the full picture. That is why I always advocate the commenting of APIs and algorithms and de-emphasize the importance of commenting the code itself. Continue Reading »

In Understanding the Game Loop, I compared two game loop implementations against each other in a consecutive manner using what I call the Litmus Testing Framework. It’s a lightweight, easy to use framework that provides for rapid visual comparisons. It will be used more and more as we get into more complicated examples here at game poetry so it is worth releasing into the wild for your perusal.

There’s a silly example included with the source code. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

How’s your relationship with your game loop? Is it a relationship based on mutual love and respect? Do you recognize each other’s strengths and weaknesses? Understanding the Game Loop is a critical element in programming interactive entertainment and utilizing it effectively can undermine or help support your development goals. In Frame Based Code Sucks!, I discussed some of the pitfalls of a game loop that is frame-rate driven. I presented a simple time based alternative in order to prevent some of the issues that we encounter in a frame-rate locked solution. This implementation was actually flawed because it was incomplete. Today, I will go over some of the pitfalls of time-based code, and how to deal with them effectively. Continue Reading »