Yup, Sqogar's right. That said, you might want to use .call(this) instead of .apply(this), since it'll be slightly easier to pass arguments to the super constructor if you need to.

One of the problems I think you're running into is that you're using Object.create(GameObjectWithFrames.prototype) instead of new GameObjectWithFrames(). The Object.create method is... Honestly, not something you're going to want to mess around with at first until you understand how prototypes work. All it does is set prototypes, whereas you want to actually create objects and call their constructors. That's what the new keyword is for.

So to go back to your original example, here's how I'd do it:

Code:

function GameObjectWithFrames() {
   GameObject.call(this); // call super constructor
   this.frame=0;
}

// Set the prototype to be an instance of the superclass
GameObjectWithFrames.prototype = new GameObject();

// Set the subclass methods on the prototype
GameObjectWithFrames.prototype.setFrame = function(frame) {
   this.frame = frame;
};

// ...

var o = new GameObjectWithFrames();
gameObjects.push(o);

EDIT: I should mention: one of the ways I learned the most about Javascript was by using CoffeeScript and examining the compiled output. Honestly, CoffeeScript is a pretty decent introduction to JS — it's the same language, but with most of the syntax warts ironed out.

I can sort of understand this, but only marginally.  If you think the platform is good enough to warrant making a new framework as it is right now, then who cares if it isn't maintained?

I think programming languages and runtimes get a lot out of their communities -- all kinds of workarounds and optimizations are only known because of the vast community of developers that Flash has. Everyone stands on the shoulders of giants, etc.

If Flash completely stops being maintained (which admittedly doesn't seem to be happening yet), then the community support's gonna drop off in a huge way, even if only because the people making the business decisions will be scared of paying developers to make things with it. So I think it makes sense to be concerned about the future of Flash maintenance, because less support means the population of giants with convenient shoulders starts to drop.

You're right: Google Sites will be more secure than running a Joomla installation on a web host. It's not as configurable, but if it covers what you need, it'll work. Same thing goes for anything else that's managed in the same sense -- WordPress.com (not a WordPress installation on a webhost, though -- that'll require maintenance+admin work, same as Joomla), Tumblr, Blogger, etc.

They may still get hacked if someone's really trying, but at least at that point you know there's not a whole lot you could've done about it without learning serious amounts of web programming. And they're all much more secure than running Joomla installations on webhosts without regularly updating.

Hope this helps.

And ability to dig trenches and enforce them with sandbags. And grenades that can collapse trees on the enemies. And booby traps. And mosquitos over the water. And vehicles...

This and this and this and this and this. Especially mosquitoes over water.

Looks so beautiful.

For a minute I thought that maybe you had a bug and the 'Z' gets precedence over the 'M' or something like that, but then we switched and she still won. 

Haha aww. Great game though, Chevy! The graphics are adorable, and the soundtrack's pretty nice too. Wish I could make it to San Francisco and play it on the Winnitron...

Re:bugs -- that's really weird. That literally has never happened to me, at any point in the development process, and Ive's never mentioned anything like that happening either. Has this happened to anyone else? Anyone know how to reproduce it? We are planning on continuing working on this, so hopefully that would be something I could get fixed...

Game was fun, even solo, but it seemed a bit long until you reach the end. Might get boring if one player is ahead, without any interaction between the players possible.

Yeah, good point. The Queen's Armory thing would've been a good way to solve it, but the deadline hit us pretty hard... I've got an idea for a fear mechanic that could help post-competition builds with that, where if you kill bunches more enemies than your opponent, you'll "scare" the enemies into your opponent's excavation shaft. Hopefully a little self-balancing, because your opponent will then necessarily start killing more enemies than you and scare them right back.

Is it just me or do the checkpoints get spaced out more towards the end? Also, at first I tried to replenish my health by interacting with the doctor. Maybe Refill health when you reach a checkpoint? Right now, it's better to die right after a checkpoint than running on with low health, hoping to reach the next. Making it so that a doc refills your hp when you reach him would fix both my confusion and that weird strategy.
After realizing it's a checkpoint I still didn't know if you just need to get on a doc's level or if you need to touch him to activate the checkpoint, so I suggest putting in a HEAL SOUND and refilling HP if you reach a doc to fix all these issues

Good point! I'll try to get that in -- it does right now make more sense to purposefully commit suicide if you're low on health and just passed a checkpoint than to keep soldiering on to the next one. By the way, the checkpoints actually appear approx. every 300 feet down -- but the enemies get tougher the deeper you go, so it takes more time and is more dangerous to move between checkpoints in the lower levels.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone! Glad you guys are liking it, even in it's rough state.

Whoa, the AI is still pretty hard. It's a cool concept, though. The jump could use a little explaining -- I kept trying to tap it and then press attack, fighting-game style.

Do the different blocks shapes affect the game much, or is it all visual?

EDIT: actually, I think I'm getting the hang of this. Different AI levels could be helpful, even if they're "fake" -- as in, just weakening the strength of their attacks. It seems like it's at a good place for someone who's played a couple of rounds, but it's definitely pretty tough for those first few tries.

Hey, I like this a lot! It's charming and simple, but the key-holding and the capture points give it some strategic oomph. A two-lane version would allow for some really interesting deception... Especially if you could switch lanes at the last second. Hope you do keep working on this, it's got potential.

<div style="padding: 5px; padding-bottom: 0; float: left"><img src="http://electricpipedreams.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/titlescreen.png" width="300" height="200" /><p style="margin-top: 0"><a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=17191.0">Jules & Verne: Race to the Center of the Earth</a>, by Reiss & Ive</p>
</div>



Jules & Verne: Race to the Center of the Earth
by Reiss and Ive

We're not dead // neither is this. DONEZO: link city. Sorry for the SwfCabin link -- I know they're ultra-slow -- but nothing else could deal with the fact that the SWF is hella wide.

Re:the music -- after a couple of messages, Sos disappeared, so it's all from cheapshot's Assemblee Part One submissions. Thanks, cheapshot. And the sound effects are all in as3sfxr.

Ive and I both were pretty busy this past month, so a couple of things got cut. Namely, the whole "Queen's Armory" thing, and netplay via Player.IO. We're hoping to get to those with a post-compo build.

Hope you enjoy!

EDIT: Heyyyy and for some reason the preloader only has two states: 0% and fully-loaded. So just hang out there while it loads, and trust that it's more loaded than it claims. It'll still run once it's all done loading.

Aw mannnnnnnnnn. Alright, guess that's the only way.

EDIT: Just played a 2-player game with my friend. The Verne controls aren't working. Most of the time I hold down and dig, nothing happens. Both of us attested to this. Jules was working fine.

EDIT again: Okay, just tried Verne by myself. Controls were working fine. I don't know what happened. We tried playing 2 games, and it didn't work.

Okay so, it looks like when Jules is digging, Verne can't. That is my hypothesis after a very brief amount of testing.

Oof. That's unfortunately a problem Flash has with certain kinds of keyboards. It has to do with key rollover -- many keyboards (especially laptop keyboards) can only register a certain number of keys being pressed at the same time, and certain keys share their wiring. Apparently it's common for them to be pretty dodgy with the arrow keys, which would make sense considering that it's Verne's controls that are being overridden by Jules's. Every keyboard's different though, and there's no way to compensate for it, aside from allowing the player to remap all keys and find by trial and error which ones are able to interact without overriding all the other ones. Hopefully I'll get netplay working, and then you can play against people using only one set of controls.

Is anyone else having this problem? Anyone figured out any workarounds, aside from implementing a full key mapping system? I might end up doing that in the end, if it's the only way...

Re: health+damage -- yup, technically there are health bars in game now (the red bars at the side of the screen). When they run out, nothing happens, cause I haven't implemented respawns yet due to the game discarding basically everything offscreen, which means you'd lose even the parts that you previously dug out. Might not matter, maybe that's just the way the game will go -- gonna try to not have that, though, so that at least you can run through areas you've already dug out.

I'm hoping that the attack-chain system means eventually you'll really have to fight the enemies. Although them just falling through after you is a pretty good idea.

I got to -8 feet before realizing you probably hadn't programmed an end. Are you going to add different kinds of enemies or obstacles as the player gets deeper into the earth?

Yes! Ive's working on some new enemy types now, and when he sends them to me I'll start throwing them in. The level's gonna be divided into zones, where certain types of enemies only appear as you dig deeper and deeper into the earth.

Becauuuuse you're supposed to! Sort of. Think hi-res Spelunky mashed up with Super Crate Box. It'll be good, I promise (I hope). Ive's been doing a great job, really love the new dinosaur designs.

AND THAT SAID.

DRAMATIC MUSIC

IT IS TIME TO UNVEIL

...A really, really early playable build, with more placeholder art than Courtney Love's got track marks. Local multiplayer only; WASD for Jules, arrows for Verne.
DIGGING: press N if you're JULES, press L if you're that LAME NO-GOODNIK. Hold your DOWN key to dig down, either way; letting go digs to the side.
SHOOTING: press B if you're JULES, press K if you're a KNOW-IT-ALL. Hold your DOWN key to shoot down, either way; letting go shoots to the side.
JUMPING: press V if you're JULES, press J if you're a JERK.


Play it here!


A couple things have changed from the initial design I posted:

• NUMBER ONE: no more thugs.  , I know. But there wasn't enough time for players to react to them falling down from the top of the screen, so they had to go.
• NUMBER TWO: attack chains. This is what's replacing the paying-off-thugs mechanic: instead of having your way paved by removing enemies, you get your way paved by impressing the Queen's Armory and having them give you higher-damage bullets. Or... you will, but right now I still haven't programmed that in due to extreme laziness / extreme business / that's what I tell myself at least. But one way you impress them, YOU MAY NOTICE, is through attack chains, which I have programmed in. The longer the chain (right now, it'll be hard to get a chain longer than two, because dinos die after two hits), the more impressed they'll be. The player who impresses them the most will get better ammo, at the expense of the other player, who'll get whatever dregs the Armory's got left in the back room. Hopefully this'll be somewhat self-balancing -- if you do more damage, you'll kill enemies with fewer hits, meaning your attack chains will necessarily be shorter and less-impressive to the Armory; sort of a blue-shell mechanic without the awful frustration of getting hit with an actual blue shell in Mario Kart.
  

So, tell me what you think!

[JULES]

Sweet new art courtesy of Ive:

JULES

VERNE


ANIMATION (Jules only)
Link

Work on the prototype's been coming alright: so far, shooting, digging, a rarely-used jump, and a super-speed ability are all in, and it's running local splitscreen multiplayer. I'm thinking that the main resource will be the gold that you get for finding underground treasure: whichever player has the most will face the least thugs. Dealing with thugs takes time, and will lose you the race -- but as a countermeasure, killing thugs will also get you gold, meaning that it'll be hard to keep your opponent completely swamped with enemies for too long without them coming back and overtaking you in the cash count.

Ive's working on Verne's animations tonight, and once both players are done I'll start posting some early builds.

Whoa, thanks for the love, guys. Inanimate -- I think I'm gonna steal the title you just gave it, "Jules and Verne" sounds more appealing than just "Race to the Center of the Earth."

Been working on a prototype, hope to have something to show soon. And Sos has generously agreed to help out with the music!

Couple of friends + couple of beers + this = PROBABLY FUCKING RAD

Oh man, this sounds neat, and your art (even if it's just placeholder) is lovely. Looking forward to playing this.

I'm a Flash programmer looking for someone to help out with (preferably pixel) art [actually, any kind would do -- was worried about performance, but I think it's not gonna be a problem], and hopefully a musician as well. Here's the thread I've got going for this compo, and here's the Minecraft-inspired entry I made to the FlashPunk 72HR game competition, for reference. PM me if interested!

And hey, if you're an artist / musician who's posted here and you've got a style I think would fit with the game, I'll probably be PMing you.

[JULES THE EXPLORER]

JULES THE EXPLORER
You are Jules, a strapping young lass leading a crack team of spelunkers, ready to make history by being the first explorer to reach the center of the Earth. Way to go!



VERNE THE WORTHLESS JERK
BUT WAIT. Verne, your dick of an ex-boyfriend, is leading his own crack team of spelunkers to the center of the Earth, too. WHO WILL MAKE IT INTO THE HISTORY BOOKS?


FEATURES

• Guns
• Treasure
• Shovels
• Dinosaurs
• Asshole ex-boyfriends

PLAY IT NOW
(Hey, and for some reason the preloader lies about how fully loaded it is, and says it's at 0% even when it's at, say, 87%. Just hang out there, and don't worry. The game'll still start once it's done loading.)

CONTROLS

• MOVING: use WASD if you're JULES, use ARROWS if you SHOOT PEOPLE THROUGH THE HEART.
• JUMPING: press V if you're JULES, press J if you're a JERK.
• SHOOTING: press B if you're JULES, press K if you're a KNOW-IT-ALL. Hold onto your DOWN key at the same time to shoot down, or your UP key to shoot up -- keep them released to shoot in the direction you're facing.
• DIGGING: press N if you're JULES, press L if you're that LAME NO-GOODNIK. Hold onto your DOWN key at the same time to dig down, or your UP key to dig up -- keep them released to dig in the direction you're facing.

If any of the above controls don't work, it's probably because your keyboard can't handle certain keys being pressed at the same time. If you find that's the case, go to "Keyboard Settings" and remap the keys to something that works.

Oh yeah, and hit ESCAPE while in the game to head back to the title screen. In case your keys aren't working, and you don't want to finish the entire game that way or wait and reload it in your browser, you can use that to get to the Keyboard Settings screen.

BUT SERIOUSLY
Split-screen, and netplay via Player.IO and Kongregate logins if I can figure it out (ran out of time -- saved for post compo build). Flash+FlashPunk. You and Verne are starting from different locations (obv, you can't stand to be nearer than ten miles to him), so your explorations don't overlap.

Play sessions will be short-- tuned to between five and ten minutes.

CREDITS
Ive and I made it. Cheapshot made the soundtrack, accidentally -- I snagged it from Assemblee. Thanks cheapshot!

Oh, man, somehow I thought the voting deadline was Feb. 7th...  Whoops.  Thanks to the person who voted for me, and congrats Ivan and everyone else!