Sunday, May 18, 2008

Bringing Command and Conquer to Flash

Who doesn't like Command and Conquer? From little five pixel men running around, to Tanya screaming "Shake it baby!" and single handedly wiping out an entire squad with two pistols, the older versions are the best. In fact, they've inspired me to bring the same feel into the flash world but with an added touch of 3D.

For the past two months I've been working on mastering 3D programming. A while back I developed a first person shooter (see Prototypes) but developing characters and large enough maps proved to slow the game down ridiculously. Playing around I developed a mapping that allowed me to piece together tiled images over a plane. After seeing it I knew I had to develop a strategy game. The very mapping technique talk about is used in the preview images below. The game can run anywhere from 7 to 15 fps, depending on how many units are built. It is programmed to run at 10 fps, so unless you build all the possible units before attacking, you will experience at least game speed.

All soldiers, tanks, and buildings take time to build.

You can select multiple units by creating a selectors box with your mouse or by pressing shift before clicking on another unit.

Buildings repair with the classic wrench. The enemy strategy is not yet perfected, though. If the scenario above were to continue, no units would ever attack the cannon tank. Also, there are no explosions as of now.

Once the strategy is fixed up a little, the graphics are finished, and I come up with a cool name, I'll release a beta for those that are interested. Oh, and I need some voice recordings of people saying things like, "Coolin my engines", "I'll be there", and "They fall like birds!" That's my favorite part of these games!

Sunday, April 13, 2008

San Francisco State Sneak Preview

Yesterday I traveled up to good old San Francisco for the SFSU sneak preview. Let me express my immediate feeling of eagerness to escape my high school captivity after a few moments on campus. The professors presented themselves as intelligent and clear, especially the head of mathematics. I know this sounds antonymical (to use a big word that I don't think exists... yet) but I'm pretty excited to take Calculous. I liked the Computer Science department as well (fitting since that's what I'm planning to major in). There's a good student/professor ratio and a good deal of opportunities both in and outside of the school. The way it was presented (granted this could be blown up a little) it seemed like getting an internship is relatively easy and usually with pay. It feels like the next few years are going to be fun. Well, enough with the parenthesis (which I have chosen to use frequently in this post) and on with my programming. Oh wait, I have to write a business plan for economics (comes to depressing realization of current high school dilemma). It seems I can neither program nor stop using parenthesis. Oh, the humanity!

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Introducing Flash First Person 3D

I've been playing around with away3d and thought I'ld share something I've created. It's a first person shooter placed in the sky. You jump between floating rocks and shoot at flying smiley faces (hilarious, creepy, and a little dumb all at the same time). Granted it's not quite a game but hopefully it will become something of use in the near future. It really goes to show what flash is capable of when you put it to the test.

First Person 3D Prototype