@Rumrusher: Caverns are planned features, but they're planned to come at the point where I get streaming levels going rather than with the current placeholder level generation.

People are still getting the lag issue, I'm going to look into it, I thought I'd fixed it <_<

NSFW - Nudity
A value and form study. ~20 min.

Been doing quite a bit of work on faces, should scan some of it.

kinnas stop showing us all up you tasty cad.

any water block would spawn more water blocks if there was free space to any of the sides or below it, so if a water block was made high on the map the whole thing would fill up. Sponges were used to kill the evil water, but it was kind of silly.

The current water bugs me in that it's infinite. It allows a lot of cool things, I know, but I can't help thinking it'd be cooler with (rough) conservation of volume, DF style.

Very true, the good thing about flash being (mostly) cross-platform is that only some of the information you find says "now do this win32-centric task and open C:\path\to\thing\ and" blah blah, instead of all of it. FlashGameDojo is great in that it's got separate tutorials for getting everything set up, and the rest of the articles are a lot more code-centric, so your environment is relatively unimportant.

Why bother with CS5 for making flash games? Grab a library (I use Flixel personally, flashpunk is also pretty cool) Write the source in any good text editor with syntax highlighting (or if you're on windows like a crazy person, get flashdevelop, which is apparently a really good IDE for AS3) and compile with flex. I tried going the adobe IDE route at one point but it's easier to treat it like a standard coding project than some sort of crazy timeline oriented whatever for me.

Only issue I have with AS3 is the lack of warnings from missing semicolons, but that's down to my lazy proof-reading.

There's a shitload of information here on making flash games, and sections for flixel and flashpunk each.



If you're only interested in design at this point, Lua is an easy language to pick up, and Love is a cool framework for prototyping ideas. Similar vein to python I suppose, but afaik Lua is easier to integrate as a scripting language for AI and whatnot, but don't quote me on that. I know crysis used it for AI behaviours. Love uses it for coding everything, and it takes care of all your drawing and sound implementation (and there's even a network lib out there I think). You can't really make money easily of love games though, as Lua is interpreted you're giving your source to all your players, which isn't an issue if you're going the FOSS route, but is if you're trying to make coin. If you're just learning the ropes though, prototyping is a great place to start.

That's gotta suck, st33d. Sounds like there could be some issues deeper in the collision code. What kind of shapes are you working with?

Anyways, I finished the piece! Thanks for the compliments!

Yummy! lovely work.

There's bound to be some bugs, but there's a new version with critical shots on the rifle and better support for buildings, as well as a lag issue fixed.

Doesn't it only serialise publics though? That was my issue when using the default system and putting it straight into the .sol

Thanks for your thoughts!

The problem is that i'm trying to keep some form of gameplay happening while implementing everything, so at this point (while I've only had the time to sprite two actors) the way I've tried to keep it kinda fun is to keep it balanced. Once the stamina and infection systems are on their way the game will get quite a bit harder, and probably a lot less fair.

However, some of those suggestions are very fun sounding. I'd thought of unundead before, and I'm definitely going to add more types of zombies. Digging is going to be slowed down quite a lot very soon, once there's a semblance of the construction system, but a more interesting subterranean layout would definitely be a good thing.

I very much like the idea of buried dead.. I might make it so there are some randomly buried skeletal zombies in earth and mud to keep the player on their toes, but also possibly mass graves filled with a good 4-10 zeds in some areas which the player could stumble upon.

thanks again for the in-depth comments.

Holy shit stats are cool today.
Average play time: 22:54!
For a flash game that I'm in the middle of making, ~20 minutes per person isn't bad at all. Yesterday (with half the people playing it) the average was more than 24 minutes!

Tiles destroyed to date: 314,511!
Zombies killed: 32,373!
All that for 1,455 deaths, in 2,017 games and 1,120 loads. Sure, it's nothing on a big release by Andy Moore, but I'm stoked that something I've only spent a few weeks on can keep people occupied for so long. I've got over 190 logged and processed hours (processing takes about a day) of play time. That's more than twice the time I've spent making the thing all up. Huzzah!

not sure what to do with them now that i've got them.  the original plan was to let the player evolve them via a genetic algorithm, but that's maybe a bit mundane and not very evocative.

Farming game where you can breed any two plants with each other by transmitting pollen and collect seeds, and trade them with people.

Also got to love it when mistakes make cool things happen re:animation.

UPDATE
Enjoy your gun. You've got 50 bullets on you at spawn, and it's fired single shot. There are some issues I'm going to work out soon enough, and I need some feedback on whether the current 30 degrees of aim difference is acceptable or if I should increase it to 45. I'm considering putting more aim angles in for firearms, we'll see what comes of that though because unless I change the system that would be a horrible amount of spriting. Sprites are placeholders, as is the bullet line.

Oh yeah, you can hit esc to drop back to the main menu as well.

That's awesome kinnas, though his face looks pretty drunken what with the glazed over eyes.

(I may have misunderstood what your problem was, in which case ignore me)

You did, but that's handy too. The problem is that I want to save and load a level object which references thousands of other flixel based objects, so I have to (learn to) implement serialisation for a good 50% of the flixel classes using the IExternalizable interface, which is a PITA to say the least. I'm putting it off by making guns happen.
Handy to know that I can actually save files that way too though, thanks. Not useful here, but it probably would be for anything a user might want to share that could be abstracted to a string or whatever.

The top circle on his foreground back spike looks off, maybe take away the hard edge on the top left corner?
Still looking great.

Gomez is animated bloody well, he's as charming as anything.
not sure I'm too keen on the gradient trail on the gold cube thing but it's looking amazing.

Shading is freaking lovely. Some sea sponges around it wouldn't go astray

What the fuck sort of nonsense is this IExternalizable stuff?
I need to be able to save a level for prelude. Turns out that that's going to involve actually manually writing a lot of the serialisation, apparently. I'm unhappy about this. I should've been expecting it, but it doesn't make it any less annoying..

UPDATED

Comments on the new stuff welcome.

The medical side of the game is going to be very important. Think medkits, disinfectants, maybe splints and whatnot if I ever split actors into components. Essentially, keeping your medical supplies in order will be important if you decide to take the zombies in melee, but there'll be a lot of other tactical opportunities (pitfalls, spikes, guns, bombs, mines, running like a bitch and trying to collapse the terrain on them) to prevent the "slash slash slash run heal slash slash" option from being the only one.

The "vanilla" (read: not needing unlocks) .22 will be a single shot bolt action deal. There'll be mag and clip-fed stuff too though. I'm not sure about what I'll do for shotguns at the moment... They're awesome and all, but I don't think straight raycasts will cut it so I'll need to get some sort of decent particle physics system happening (the current system doesn't work at high speeds).

uh, yeah.
oh, screenshot, this is about as long as the grass gets for the most part.

I'll get onto having grass grow and a spore dispersal system and whatnot soon, going to fix some bugs and maybe get onto the .22, but I'm bloody tired from flying today, got up at 5am, got home at 5pm. ugh.