Some of the clever guys I work with at Visual Jazz (looking at you Tom) have taken my AS3 code and reworked it to play nice with Apples nifty little machines. Best of all, you can download them for free!

Strike Fighter was the first one done – it is only available for the iPhone at the moment. You can check it out by going here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/strike-fighter/id389734422?mt=8


Warfare officer has been completed more recently. It has been set up for both iPhone and iPad and can be checked out here: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/navy-warfare-officer/id393458494?mt=8

Be sure to check them out!

Here is a quick summary of some of the techniques I used when building this game.

Performance

The first thing I had to figure out was how to manage all of the models and assets for the game. I knew there would be a lot of 3D going on – which is not exactly flash’s strong point.

Initially I started out by setting up a basic camera controller and loading in as many models as I thought I would need. This gave me an indication of what level of detail I could get away with without sacrificing too much detail. This formed the basis for pretty much the rest of the game development.

The next thing I played with was the frame rate. Originally I ran the entire program at 60fps, which was awesome, but as I added in more and more features I discovered that it was pushing the CPU pretty hard.
I dropped the frame rate back down to 30fps which made little difference to the visual display of the game elements, but unfortunately made the UI elements seem a bit sluggish.

To get around it this problem, I split the game up into a variety of different renderers, each running at the minimum speed possible.

The render layer used for the for the GUI elements were set up to run at 60fps, whilst the ‘boats / islands’ and ‘water’ layer ran at a much slower 25fps. There was also an under water layer for a while when I had transparent water, but that had to be removed due to performance issues.

A unexpected positive side effect of this approach was that it prevented a lot of the clipping problems that were occurring between the boats and the water.

Ripple Effects

The ripples around the boats and islands were created by putting a simple 3D plane under the loaded in MD2 models. The benefits of this approach was that it allowed me to keep the complexity of the MD2 model down a bit, as well as making it easy to edit and animate the texture.

Having a plane for the ripples under the boat came in handy for the collision detection as well. It game me a simple shape to check projectile collisions against (there is another invisible vertical one as well).

Explosions

The explosions were a key part to the game. We wanted them to be big and look awesome, but at the same time we were limited by the rendering powers of flash.

We decided to take a billboard approach, which is basically some planes that would always face the camera. Usually this technique looks pretty flat, so I experimented with some different styles and finally came up with a way that I think looked pretty good.

The 3D / After Effects guys created and rendered out some explosion animations that were split into two parts – the main explosion and the flat ripple effect on the water. I created an object that had two similar planes – one for the ripple and one for the explosion. The ripple laid flat on the ocean and never moved, whilst the main explosion rotated around a point at the base, an was angled to face the camera.

Depending on the explosion animation, the pivot point would sometimes be moved to compensate for alignment issues.


To make it look better, I got the 3D guys to render out explosion animation from an angle that was similar to that used by the games camera. This helped give the explosions the look of volume and depth.

Although technically the perspective is not quite correct, it is only really noticeable when the explosions are in the closest corners of the view.

Path finding

Path finding was a big part of Warfare Officer – and a part I put off for too long because of fear… I had never done any kind of path finding before so it was all a learning experience.

I did some reading and found a really good post explaining the A* path finding technique – A* Pathfinding for Beginnners. It explained the technique very well and I was able to knock up my own basic system one Sunday afternoon.

I soon had the boats moving around the world following the A* grid, but it didn’t look quite natural. This was mainly because the ships would move to the centre of each grid cell, moving in an almost robotic manner. I set about figuring out a way to smooth out the path to make it a bit smoother and more boat like.

The technique I came up with was to start by generating the A* path. Then I would draw a line from the first node to each subsequent node until I hit an obstacle. If an obstacle was hit, I would store the last point I reached, before starting the process again from this new point.

What I ended up with was a path that smoothed out a lot of the diagonal movements, making the boats move in a much more direct manner.

Artificial Intelligence

AI is another one of those things I had never attempted. For a first attempt, I think that the computer puts up a pretty good fight.

My approach was to break the AI into two separate parts that worked together – a boat AI and a master AI.

The master AI would run over everything about every 10-15 seconds looking at everything the boats and base could see and figure out a basic game plan. In most cases this would be to have one ship patrol the defensive third of the map, whilst the other two wander out towards the enemy base. The AI would sometimes call for a full on charge at the enemy base when it recognised that the defenses were weak.

The boats would take the master AI’s objective for them and then decide what exactly they would do. If there was an enemy ship near by they may choose to ignore them or engage depending on what their weapon status. The would also occasionally focus all their attention on the enemy base which helped make them a bit less predictable.

When a boat AI engaged the player it would loop through all of its available weapons and would test to see what had a chance of actually hitting them. Once a collection of possibly successful weapons was collated, it would choose one at random, then attempt to fire it.

The position that the AI would aim for was based on the position of the players boat, with a random X and Y value applied to make it slightly less accurate.

To try and make the battle a bit more even, the enemy ships use a slightly shorter range on all weapons. I found that this was necessary to give the user time to engage computer, otherwise they would usually die before they even had a chance to fire.

To stop the game from ‘cheating’ the AI tracks the player’s boats itself rather than using data from the actual game. It stores the last known position of each boat based on what it can see, so if the player destroys a ship, the AI will store that position as the last known position of the enemy and may consider sending a ship there to seek revenge.

In the end, the whole thing runs of a complex set of if/then statements and is governed by a bunch of random number calls to make decisions. I basically just kept plugging in values until I got a result I was happy with.

That sums up most of the main parts of the game. I hope it has given some insight into how some of the systems work. If you have any questions about a particular part, please feel free to post a comment and I will get back to you!

Take control of three Australian navel ships and lead them on a mission to destroy the enemy base whilst protecting your own.

When you first start up the game you are requested to select a fleet for your battle. You are initially presented with 3 preset fleets – Offensive, Defensive or Balanced. Each fleet is made up of three different vessels from a collection of Australian navel vessels – an Armidale Class Patrol Boat, Anzac Class Frigate, Collins Class Submarine, Hobart Class Air Warfare Destroyer or a Canberra Class Landing Helicopter Dock.

Each vessel has its own set of attributes in regards to speed and strength. Some also have some extra features such as support vehicles. Each select vessel also has an Australian Navy personnel member assigned to it which provides the vessel with an extra feature, such as better defences or a support craft.

After that, the game begins. You are given control of your three vessels and pointed in the direction of the enemy base.

The goal of the game is to find and destroy the enemy base before they destroy yours. The map is filled with a number of islands so it is not too difficult to sneak past your enemy without getting into a conflict.

To control a ship you simply click on it with your mouse. Once selected, a list of possible actions are displayed along the bottom of the screen (with move being the default action).

Selecting an action will either carry it out straight away, or trigger a targeting radius showing the area in which the action can be carried out.

If one of your ships is destroyed in battle, it will be reconstructed after a period of time – as will your enemies ships. it is important to take advantage of this time because the ships will be rebuilt at their base and are made invincible for a short period of time.

There is a single player campaign where you go up against a rather ruthless computer opponent – or a multiplayer game where the enemy is controlled by another player. Both are online now and playable at Defence Jobs.

This was the second major game I got to build for defencejobs.gov.au whilst working at Visual Jazz and it was definitely the biggest game I have ever worked on.

Source : www.tugaskita.com

The rest was a combination of some basic 3D and a few little tricks. To find out more, read on

A lot of the inspiration for the coding side of things came from the ABC Flyer experiment over at wonderfl.net. It was a very simple little experiment that went a long way to setting up what became Strike Fighter.

The original ABC flyer used a pretty insane custom 3D stuff which was well above my head. I got the jist of a lot of it, but not enough to be able to work with efficiently, so I started looking for an alternative.

Around the time that I started, Away3D lite (away3d.com/) came out. Up until that time I had only ever used PaperVision 3D, but I kinda wanted something smaller and faster to keep the game running smoothly. I found Away3D Lite to be really easy to use and was soon up and running with a demo similar to the wonderfl example.

The Main Scene

The main scene for the game was made up from a combination of 3D planes laid out at about 90 degrees, with one main plane for the ground, and another two set up for the background / horizon.

The ground plane was simply one big plane that had a bitmap texture applied. When simulating the motion I used a technique I picked up from the ABC Flyer – offset the bitmap rather than moving the plane. This proved to be much more efficient and gave a better result.

The background / horizon was originally set up as one large single plane, but because I used a texture that faded out to transparency I noticed that there was a bit of a slow down. I ended up splitting it into two planes, with the major area using a non-transparent texture, and a much smaller plane for the graduated fade. The visual look what pretty much identical with a noticeable performance increase.

All of these elements were then placed inside a container so that I could rotate and tilt the entire world when the jet banked etc.

The F35 Jet

The model of the F35 jet was a 3D model that the 3D guys at VJ built. I added in a 3D cone at runtime to act as the flame for the After Burner which I simply scaled up and down to suit the speed. I also added in some contrails to the wing tips by generating a series of semi-transparent white planes that were laid out to form a line – (this was done using the missile smoke technique I explain later)

To make the jet change colour to suit the scene I simply applied a predefined ColourTransform to the BitmapData used for the jet’s texture. This of course lead to the rather stupid problem of the jet’s engine flame being tinted as well. To get around this, I measured up the exact spot in the texture where the engine was and reapplied the original colours from that area to the tinted version I had created.

Missiles

The missile were one of the more challenging things to get working the way I wanted.

I started by trying a few simple ideas on how to simulate the motion of a missile, but they all tended to look too circular in their motion. Then I started searching the web for some ideas – it took ages to find something that worked, and it took even longer to tweak it until it suited my game. I would normally link to the site now, but I don’t know where I got it from – most likely gamedev.net.

Once I had the motion working, I started on the graphics. The idea was to draw some planes along the path to generate the smoke trail. This was simple enough to do, but it hit a couple of major problems.

Firstly, the sheer number of planes I was creating / destroying meant that the CPU took a pretty big hit once you started firing lots of missile. To get around this I came up with a pretty simple solution. Each smoke trail would only ever have 5 planes created for it. It would stretch and recycle these planes for the life of the trail.

The second problem I had was that a lot of the time the planes would be draw in such a way that their edge would be facing the camera, resulting in path that looked like it was missing pieces.

To get around this, I simple made it so that each segment of the smoke trail was always rotated to face the centre of the screen. This resulted in smoke trails that tend to work from every position on the screen, except maybe in the dead centre.

Once I had a class set up to handle doing the smoke trails for the missiles, it was easy to port it to contrails on the wing tips, etc.

Enemy Jets

These are actually pretty boring. They are basically just a bitmap texture applied to a plane that is position way off in the distance and scaled up to match the game speed.

Each of the jets actually use the same class, but have different constraints loaded in at run time via XML. This meant that it was easy to debug because there was only one class, and I could also easily tweak the behaviours of each type of jet.

Enemy bosses

The enemy bosses were like a a cross between the enemy jets and the players F35.

The jets themselves are some designs that the 3D guys and VJ modeled up. Like the F35 they are loaded in as MD2 files at runtime.

Their behaviour is a bit like the enemy jets in that there is one common class for all of them, with each being given individual attributes via XML.

Last little bits

Once I had all of these elements built and tied together, I had to create a way to script what would happen when. I came up with a simple xml structure that listed what type of enemy jets to spawn, how many to spawn at a time, when to save a checkpoint and when to fight a boss.

Then it was just a case of creating a manager class that parsed through this xml and triggered the correct items at the right time.

In the end this made it really easy to set up various stages and test out the different enemy units.

Summary

Strike Fighter was the first real serious game I had created in flash and I think it came together pretty nicely. Of course I couldn’t have done it without the hard work from the team of guys at Visual Jazz or the guys from wonderfl and Away3D.

If you have any question about anything I’ve mentioned here (or failed to mention) please feel free to drop me a line.

It was actually completed months ago, I’ve just been lazy about adding it to my site.



The basis of the game is pretty standard – fight your way through wave after wave of enemy jets, and get as many points as you can.

To help keep things interesting there are two different styles of play – Campaign and Survival.

The ‘Campaign’ mode is set out in a stage by stage basis.
There are 7 stages set across 5 different scenes, with each scene containing a different set of enemy aircraft that get progressively more difficult as the game goes on.
At the end of each stage your score and bonuses are added up. As you score more and more points you unlock new skins for your jet.

You are also given the opportunity to spend the credits you collect on upgrades for your jet. These are spread across three key areas – Armament, Avionics and Electronics – and include things like faster lock-on times, multiple missiles, radar jamming, agility upgrades, etc.


At the end of the last three areas you are confronted by extremely large ‘bosses’ that almost fill the screen. They attempt to ram you as well as bombard you with multiple missiles. Arghhh!


Survival mode is kinda the same except that instead of a ‘mission’ based approach, you get just one life and fight through as many waves of enemy jets as you can. You also get to choose which scene the game will be set in, so you can practice with the various sky lines.

To help make the learning for fun and keep the kids interested, a major section of the site was a series of mini games with a planet saving theme. It was my job to build those games… I love my job

Read on to hear about the games, and then check them out at VISY Enviromaniacs.

Each of the games had a different theme, focussing on different ways to save the environment. To keep things interesting, we made sure that the games were also different in the way that they played. We didn’t one to have 5 of the same game with just a graphics changed.

As always, deadlines were tight, but the managers and designers that I worked with were right on top of things, so it all ended up falling into place.

Here is a quick run through of what we made:

Recycle Frenzy

Recycle Frenzy was the first game we made. It was a bit of across between Bejeweled, Tetris and a sorting game. Pieces of litter would be added to the bottom of the screen, one row at a time. The player would have to drag the pieces of litter the appropriate bin – general waste, recycling, paper or green waste.

If the rubbish made it all the way to the top of the screen, the game was over.

To add a bit of spice to the game, the player could swap the positions of litter by dragging them around the grid. Arranging litter into larger groups before dragging it to the bin would result in bonus points being added to the score.

Also, by filling up the bins the user unlocked ‘power ups’ that allowed them to do things like remove an entire row or column with a single click.

Keeping with the tradition with these types of games, the speed would gradually increase as the game went on, causing for some very frantic game play – hence the ‘frenzy’ part

Energise the Earth

Energise the Earth is a bit of a strange game. It is a very simple concept, but proved to be a bit harder to build then initially thought.

The basic idea of the game is to collect the energy that is escaping from appliances around the house. As you look around the room, ‘energy tokens’ will jump out from different appliances and you have to roll your mouse over them to collect them.

Each room you enter has a specified number of energy tokens you have to collect to successfully pass the room. If you reach that amount, you move onto the next room. If you don’t, it is game over.

There are 5 rooms in total, including the living room, study, kitchen, laundry and bedroom. If you pass all of the rooms, you start again, but with higher umber of tokens required in each of the rooms.

It is surprising frantic and keeping up with the pace can be quite stressful. Good luck!

Wild About Water

Wild About Water was the second game I had to build. This one was a bit more complex and confusing, but one you get the hang of it, it is quite addictive and satisfying.

The idea behind it is that you have to keep on top of all the possible water wasting events that occur around a house. Everything from fixing dripping taps to covering swimming pools to prevent evaporation. When something goes wrong, you are alerted and given an amount of time to fix the problem. The longer you take to fix the problem, the more water you will lose. If you run out of water, the game is over.

It’s not all bad though. When you fix a problem, you are given the chance to collect that water with your bucket, adding to your overall water total.

If that wasn’t enough though, there are a couple of side tasks you have to keep in mind. Firstly, you have to keep the plants alive by giving them some of your water at regular intervals. Secondly, you have to drag dishes to the dish washer and clothes to the washing machine, making sure that the machines are full before they start so that you don’t waste water.

As I write this, it does sound overly complex, but like I said at the start, once you get used to it, it does prove to be a challenge.

Bitter About Litter

Bitter about Litter is all about collecting and sorting litter. Sounds like fun, I know, but the game does go a long way to making it so.

You control a guy, in a park full of litterers. As they drop throw their litter on the ground, you run over and pick it up. You then bring it back to your bins where you quickly sort it into either waste or recycling.

When there is litter on the ground, your health begins to drop. The more litter that is there, the faster your health will drop. When you put rubbish int the bins, you get a bit of your health back – as long as it is going into the right bin. When your health runs out, the game is over.

To add some more interest to the game, the player is awarded bonus points for sorting items of rubbish into the the bins without making mistakes. There are also bonus points for returning with as much rubbish as you can carry.

Another nice feature we slotted into the game is that the character in the game actually takes on the look of the player’s ‘enviromaniac’ avatar. A small thing I know, but still pretty cool.

Pick Your Packets

Pick Your Packets is all about learning and identifying the different packaging types you may encounter in the super market.

The player is given the task of sorting the various products into either good or bad packaging types. Good items get scanned and added to the shopping basket, bad items get returned to the store. To help them out, when ever they pick up a product a small description is displayed on the check-out display.

As the game goes on, the items on the conveyor begin to come out more rapidly. If the player is not fast enough, the products will begin to back up, causing the players health to drop. If the health reaches 0, the game is over.

Thats pretty much it so far. If you are interested in checking them out just head over to the VISY Enviromaniac site. Also, big Kudos to the team at Visual Jazz who I work with. They did an awesome job on building the site. You can read a bit about it on the VJ site here.

You’ll be sent an email with a custom URL that you and anyone else can use to play your online jigsaw.

The simple application that I have created makes the whole proccess pretty simple.

Click here to build your own Jigsaw

Once you are done you can go check out your puzzle or play on of mine by clicking here.

Just as a side note, any images you upload will potentially be available to the public, so please don’t upload anything that breaks copyright or that may be offensive to others.

You start off with a board full of randomly coloured marbles. When you click on a group of two or more matching colours, they disappear, and the grid collapses to fill the gaps. The bigger the group you match, the more points you earn.

It’s simple but pretty addictive.

Click here to play Marble Buster

Instructions:

• Use your mouse to select a set of marbles (two or more adjoinging marbles of the same colour). You will be given an indication of how many points they are worth.
• Click that group again and they will disappear.
• The remaining marbles will collapse to fill the gaps. First they will drop straight down, and then they will slide right to fill any gaps.
• Everytime the left most column is empty, new marbles will be added to the board.

Click here to play Sevenson Jigsaw

Instructions:

• Use your mouse to drag and drop pieces to the correct positions.
• Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate the current piece whilst you are dragging it.
• When pieces are aligned correctly they will snap together to become one piece.

Graphics Download:

When this game was being created it was hard to find a free graphic of a jigsaw puzzle on the web. I ended up creating my own by scanning an actual jigsaw puzzle and then tracing the pieces myself.

So you don’t have to go through the same trouble, below are the links for my jigsaw puzzle shapes:

• Jigsaw Puzzle Outlines - EPS
• Jigsaw Puzzle Outlines - JPG

Build your own online jigsaw puzzle:

I’ve added the ability for anyone to create their own puzzle to play and share online. All you need is an image and an email address and you will be on your way.

Click here to build your own Jigsaw

You play as a frog, sitting on the side of the pond. As bugs fly over your head you use your tongue to catch as many as you can. To keep things interesting, there is a timer counting down the whole time. Every time you catch 10 bugs, you get a little bit more time.

The longer you last, the harder the bugs are to catch, and the more points you get.

See if you can get the highest score!

Click here to play Grabbit

Instructions:

• Use your mouse to click where you want the frog’s tongue to shoot to.
• Every 10 bugs you catch results in a time extension.
• The further your tongue shoots out, the more ‘tongue strain’ you will build up.
• If your ‘tongue strain’ reaches full you will not be able to reach as far.