Read on for my postmortem.

The Good

I started development with a tool I was fairly proficient in, HaXe. This helped lower my programming time since I didn’t have to learn any new tricks. The tools for open source flash development are getting to be pretty stable and I didn’t have to spend a lot of time setting up my development environment. Another huge asset to my development time was TextMate for the Mac. This has a simple project interface that allowed me to execute quick builds and retest in seconds.

Creating graphics is something I am not very good at, and something that took a lot of time during the last speedgame competition. Instead of creating my own graphics I did a quick search on Google for sprites and tile sets and found some excellent resources. These images combined with a feature complete tile map editor, Tiled, helped me get graphics in the game within a few hours.

The Bad

One of my weaker areas, besides graphics, is game design. The game I made is very similar to Harvest Moon and many of the things I wanted to implement I ran out of time to do. The game is mildly fun but gets repetitive in a hurry and I think with a few more days of development it could be a much more exciting game. Which brings me to my next point.

I ended up with a shortened development time since I was not aware of the competition until a week into the event. Getting a late start caused me to rush into things and design as I was programming. The end result was vastly different than my original idea and some of the code I worked on was never put into the game. I also managed to get sick during the week and had to work harder the next day to catch up.

In The End

Looking back at the last week I am impressed with how far I managed to get in such a short period of time. The final product was not as great as I envisioned but that does not stop me from continuing my work.

If you are interested in the project check out our blog. Feel free to post comments and let us know what you think. We are looking for artists that are interested in donating some artwork or working with us. We do not plan to make any money from the game so we’re not looking for quotes.

So what I plan to do is write an assembler similar to HLA. The syntax will mask some of the commands, like setting up classes, but will remain low level enough to get the speed increase. I’ll post more as I work out the details.

Here is what I think the syntax may look like.

;==============================
; Fibonnaci Sequence
;==============================

#include "stdlib.fas"

; Flash helpers
$version 9
$width 320 ; 6400 twips
$height 240 ; 4800 twips
$start App

; -=-=-= App Class =-=-=-
%class App

welcome string "Hello World!"
cnt byte 1

%function fib (1)
pop r1 ; pull argument into r1
push 1 ; small integer
jgt over ; jump if (1 > r1)
push 1
ret
over: dec r1
push this
push r1
callp "fib", 1
dec r1
push this
push r1
callp "fib", 1
add
ret
end ; fib

%function main (0)
push 2 ; push a function argument
callp "fib" ; call fib(2)
ret
end ; main

.function asmTest (2)
xor ; xor both arguments
pop r1 ; pop the result
push welcome
push nan
pop r5
end ; asmTest
end ; App

Since the game will be used at a Christian camp in my area, the game is based around the book of Acts. The player acts as one of the disciples traveling from city to city and encouraging the people there. It is basically a simplistic simulation game that is light on graphics.

The mechanics aren’t very fun at this point but I am making progress. All of the images were imported through SWFMill and the code will be available shortly.

Here is the current version of the game.
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