Well I’m happy to say I can now call the porting over process of Treasure Caves 2 to Air for Android is complete. Except for a little bug testing the game will all 100 levels is running smoothly and works well in the new format.
Here’s the video showing how it’s looking, running on Air for Android OS 2.1on an HTC Desire …
There are a couple of small things that need tweaking, but they can wait till I hear any bug reports. I should be launching this game immediately as I’m self sponsoring this one. w00t!
Flipit for mobile devices (AIR and Flash player 10.1) is finished, after what I estimate to be around 8 hours work of recoding and applying graphics from the original AS2 version. Certainly though it’s helped by being a very simple game, and having all the graphics all ready setup. I decided against using music in this version, rather wanting to keep it a simpler and kind of ‘calmer’ experience.
Here’s a video showing a few levels, running on an HTC Desire using a pre-release of AIR and android system 2.1 …
The game is a simple tile colour game where each tile will flip over it’s neighboring tiles, with the aim to make all the tiles white. The tiles are a pre-rendered png sequence placed on a timeline, that I then blit and rendering using similar techniques in my other recent games.
The performance is really quite slow at the moment, around 16 fps which I’m not sure why of yet, but it should be no problem speeding up. Probably just a bit of clumsy code from developing it so fast.
Wow, that’s all I can say. Flash combined with Air makes for some magic stuff.
Following on from my quick port test a few days ago I realized that I really need to code the game almost from scratch. My techniques for rendering, game structure, performance, object management and more have all changed since I wrote the original game and it was proving to be a nightmare to work with. I needed to increase rendering performance and a lot of code needed to be changed.
Along with recoding the game I also needed to rearrange screen elements to suit the phone format while also increasing the in-game graphics. Thankfully the original games graphics are in vector format (which I also blitted in the original) so resizing everything has been a quick process. I’ve pretty much doubled the size of the in game sprites, so the play area is a lot smaller, but still feels playable enough – the original was written as a scrolling environment so it really hasn’t taken much to do this
It’s been a fairly quick process as I’ve been able to refer back to my original code to see what was needing to happen, but then writing it in a much more efficient way. I don’t intend to change the gameplay at all, just port the game over to the new layout.
I’m probably about two thirds of the way through getting the game finished.
To stay prepared and keep the content flowing I decided to give one of my previous games a go on Air for Android. The game I chose is ‘Treasure Caves 2′.
Straight in to the video before I ramble on …
This is running on a pre-release of AIR for Android, using OS 2.1
I chose this game for a few reasons …
It one of my favourites
it has simple controls that can easily be mapped to buttons on screen
it’s coded in AS3 and though I had made it to the best of my ability at the time, I should be able to improve it’s performance a lot.
it uses a tile based engine that I can reuse in the game ideas I have, so getting this working well will make the following games much easier to produce.
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When getting the game to work on Air I found a bit of my code that worked on desktop didn’t work when trying to get it on the phone. Mostly this was poorly written classes that tried to access the stage before it was ready and shared objects (which in this game had a poor implementation, I’ve since fixed it in my newer games.
I’m thinking I will change this game to a vertical format as the game play are is already at the right size and having the controls below that may feel and play better, while also allowing me to make them a little larger – my fingers tend to be a little big on this size screen.
