The Art of Sticking to the Plan

So I ran into a lot of trouble with Flash yesterday. Seems that compiling from the Flex SDK (mxmlc.exe) produces different results from most compilations in any sort of framework. Great example;

variableA = 1/3;

variableB = 1.0/3.0;

In MXMLC, VariableA is equal to 0 and B is 0.3333. In IDEs (Flash, FlashStudio, etc.), the framework is smart(?) enough to evaluate both to a decimal value.

It is producing all kinds of headaches. Yesterday I swore off Flash and decided to not making games anymore. After a few beers this afternoon I was able to reconcile my differences and produce my first compilation.

I'll be honest here: That is nearly line-for-line written from a "How-to" tutorial and is just some cheap vectoring and nothing physics based. I ran with this code and made myself a nice start and finish line, and fiddled with some input commands.

Then I realized everything I was doing was a horrible idea. My end product will have physics in it - and tacking that on later in development, especially for a newbie like me, will likely result in me swearing off game development again.

I scrapped all my starter code and grabbed the latest Box2DAS3 set. This is an excellent collection of physics tools you can use in any flash application. A few quick mods, and learning from my previous mistakes, I was able to make a gravitational objects demo. Again, primarily me just compiling some pre-made code with minor edits here and there (it took me all of an hour to do), but it has helped me prove I can setup this dev environment properly.

It also served as a cautionary tale. I had so much fun playing the latest demo I spent a further hour tweaking it to be even more fun. The change ended up being relatively minor: removing friction from the ball surfaces. An hour. And this isn't even the direction my game is going.

I decided to blog about it, post a link, and scrap the code. I could spend 5 years chasing neat idea after neat idea... But for better or worse, I have a design in mind, and a time frame to adhere to. I can't waste time chasing these now. Maybe Game #2 will use these mechanics... But for now, I have to focus.