Particle Experimentation

I’ve been tinkering with my particles again. I thought I’d see what they would look like changing size, it looks good but it also means that some particles will be hard to collect I think when I get some more of the game elements in place.

Particles To Music

I’ve been experimenting again with the particle code and believe I have something close to what I want, but will probably keep tweaking over the next few months. At the moment it is shooting the particles up according to the amplitude of the music, and works with any mp3 file. This is my first real foray into working with classes, and is very complicated for me. When I learn something new in code it seems to leave me straight away a few hours later.

Movement

Thought I’d leave the particle system code alone for a bit and look into movement from my character. There are a few options I can take, but for the time being I’ve rested on the character going where ever the mouse is. It’s very quick and will react well to user inputs reactions.

I Want Never Gets

At the moment I am hoping to have a scoreboard so that players can compete with each other for high scores on each level; a level been the song as it will set the rate, height, amplitude everything but the size of the particles. Having other interactive elements and a progressive levelling system is the hard part now I think about deciding what to do. Scoreboard will have to be something to look into in terms of feasibility. I would also like if possible to incorporate the ability to add your own music and or play music located on line, again feasibility will be the issue, a) if it is even possible to do it and b) if I’ll have the technical knowledge to achieve it.

When it works...

I have been looking at marrying the music raw data to spark off the particles. I’ve been looking all over and there are not many examples, nearly all using graphics API to draw lines and abstract shapes so it’s hard to find inspiration code wise for this. This is especially difficult as I am not proficient in code at all. I’ve been particularly stressed about some code for the client brief for which Chris has taken over to fix, to which I’m relieved about, all this does not help my love of AS3. I’ve found that I love it when it works and is very powerful but when it doesn’t, it’s very stressful. At least with designing an unreal map you have some visual feedback all the time, if a certain aspect doesn’t work you can change it but if certain code doesn’t work, the whole thing doesn’t work.

Particle Systems

I Have been experimenting with particle systems. I had a quick go over the summer using my book but in true Johnson style other stuff has pushed that knowledge out so I’m tinkering again. It’s hard to see here because it just looks like circles drawn but there is in fact movement to these circles. There’s a lot you can do with particle systems and I’ve just signed up to Lynda.com; a pay per view tutorial website that guides you through basic skills. I hope to build up sufficient goals to accomplish my FMP.

Change of Idea!

After some thought about the platform game I have realised that the game I would create would not be exactly what I was after, I could have either; spread the spectrum from an mp3 to make an undulating map, in which case it would end up like Mario or I could have an intense terrain which is what I had in my mind all along, this like I mentioned in a previous post would have been too hard for the player and isn’t working brilliantly code wise.
After talking with James I decided to have a go at slightly different game type, this would be more like a scrolling platform game, in which music will make object appear and you have to avoid them whilst collecting the music particles that appear on screen.