Need help with a few things (upgrades, destruction)

Okay, so I’ve been coming to this site for quite a while, and now it’s finally time to jump on the forums and ask some questions. I need help.

I’m about to start up work on a Flash game that is based on a character model that gets destroyed during, and the upgraded parts that are reapplied after, each level. Though I’ve made several games in the past, they were pretty basic. I haven’t started on this project yet, but I don’t really know where to begin when it comes to the upgrading of parts and the reattachment of new ones. Think along the lines of “I Am Going To The Moon” in terms of upgrades and the sense of how each level plays out for you.

So, any thoughts or ideas? Anyone want to try taking a stab at some backend? Tell me all about your special feelings.

You could probably just do it with variables,…have each upgrade as a separate sprite added to main sprite, set them to visible/invisble when applicable.

This is the sort of thing where there is no “trick” to it. It’s just plain old vanilla programming. I would recommend that you simply improve your programming knowledge, and the way forward will become obvious.

Please don’t fill up the board with classic “if you just knew more you could do it yourself” comments. I’m no idiot, but with all the other things I do, I literally don’t have the time to go back and relearn programming for this project. I’m not really looking for a quick code snippet or anything like that. I’m looking for someone that can assist me in making this game happen and was hoping to find someone that could do such a thing. Would you be able to do so?

No-one will make it for you. Not even if you PM them.

Walk left side of road, safe. Walk right side of road, safe. Walk middle of road, squashed just like grape. Either you make game yes, or you make game no. Make game guess so, squashed just like grape.

Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.

You could do it and fail, which would technically be trying. But still, full throttle or nothing.

Listen to Yoda and Mr. Miyagi. They know best.

Lol. I guess I shouldn’t have asked. All these years I’ve felt that this was such a friendly and helpful board, too.

Originally posted by Uncultivated:

Lol. I guess I shouldn’t have asked. All these years I’ve felt that this was such a friendly and helpful board, too.

You’re just bad. We’re all nice to each other because we actually enjoy developing.

Vector of Part objects

/thread.

I enjoy developing, and I have done quite a bit of it, but now I have a family and several businesses running so there’s not a lot of time to go back to school (so to speak) to take the time and learn a whole new concept just to get one game made. I would much rather have a partner that would want to assist in coding. This always seemed like a place where people could make games together.

You should have presented the question in a form of “I need a programmer and I’ll be doing the art”. Not “I have barely any programming knowledge whatsoever but I want to make a game”. If anyone could make a good game then it wouldn’t be a skill now would it? Sorry if you think that’s “mean” or “rude” but sometimes the truth hurts.

I would suggest you start with planning, and don’t start programming until you have very specific ideas in mind.

I can’t completely decipher what your plan is, but this is the jist I get…
So you have components on your character that are upgradeable. This could be weapons, armour pieces, helmets, leggings, boots, shields, etc. They are upgradeable in terms of statistics and graphics.
During gameplay the parts are destroyed and they visually deteriorate and then disappear from screen.

I would recommend deciding exactly what parts you wanted to have. Then I would note down the exact statistics you want them to have. Things such as HP, defence points, damage, etc.
Then you will need to design the upgrades, all the different graphics, transitions, prices, etc.
You will also need to define how these parts are damaged through gameplay. You will have to create elements in game that can damage your player and/ or armour pieces.

You can start to see it becomes quite complicated fast.

If you are serious about this, I would recommend just starting with 1 thing first. Perhaps a sword or something. Prototype the whole concept, and try to generalise it so that you can take the knowledge from that 1 piece to all the others you’ll need to implement. You will definitely want to look into inheritance and creating a superclass for your parts.

Not trying to be an arse (and in all fairness, I was just being facetious before with the Yoda quote, and I blame GameBuilder for starting it anyway) but your question is somewhat vague, and the process you describe somewhat complex. The questions that get answered the fastest and to the highest satisfaction of the OP are usually the most specific ones. Posting all relevant code, and only relevant code also shows that you’re not totally clueless about what you’re doing and that you’ve made at least a cursory attempt at solving the problem yourself. Both are important, because in posting a thread you are essentially asking strangers to volunteer their time to help you. Meeting them partway is common courtesy and encourages goodwill.

Anyway, now on to your problem. First I’m going to describe it as I understand it, and then I’ll provide you with a rough sketch of a potential solution to the problem as I understand it, hence why it’s so important that your original explanation be complete and precise.

You have an object, several aspects of which can be upgraded, and each upgrade has a specific visual representation. For simplicity, I will call the object a ‘plane’, and the upgradable parts will be the ‘nose’, ‘wings’, ‘engine’, and ‘fuselage’. I will assume that every part is attached to the fuselage, and that every part except the fuselage may be removed. Here’s how I would proceed:

- First I create a Part class, which extends Sprite. This class contains:
– The ‘kind’ property, which can take the values of ‘nose’, ‘wings’, ‘fuselage’ or ‘engine’.
– attachment:Point // indicates which pixel of the Part overlaps with the attachment point for this kind on the fuselage.
– upgradelevel:uint // how many times has this part been upgraded. Also used to figure out what to draw on the part.
– image:Bitmap // Only if you use raster graphics. Vector art can be drawn directly on the Part’s canvas.
– Whatever else you want a Part to have in terms of properties, health (so you know when to detach them) , bonuses of various kinds etc…

- Then I create a function to build the plane out of Parts, brand new. It should only take a sequence of uints (the individual part upgrade levels) as input.

public function initialize():void // Called once when the game first starts. We don't want to be 
//trashing/remaking Parts every five minutes.
{
    fuselage = new Part();
    wings = new Part();
    fuselage.addChild(wings);
etc... with other parts.
}

public function buildPlane(fuselagelevel:uint, noselevel:uint, wingslevel:uint, enginelevel:uint):void
{
    fuselage.build("fuselage", fuselagelevel); // the first argument determines what kind of part you're
    nose.build("nose", noselevel); // making and the second one indicates at what upgrade level.
etc... with the rest of the parts.
}

As you can see, rebuilding the plane before each level is only a matter of calling buildPlane() with the proper values, so as long as you keep track of what the various upgrade levels are, it’s really no big deal.

- The next step is building the rest of the game, all the things that break down the plane, and really I can’t help you much with that, you should know all about it, though.

Originally posted by LennonLenford:

You should have presented the question in a form of “I need a programmer and I’ll be doing the art”. Not “I have barely any programming knowledge whatsoever but I want to make a game”. If anyone could make a good game then it wouldn’t be a skill now would it? Sorry if you think that’s “mean” or “rude” but sometimes the truth hurts.

Let me rephrase then:

I have been in the entertainment industry creating various digital media for the past 17 years. During that time, while not producing television shows, music videos and films, toys and websites (as if that’s a real time killer), I have created many games of the video variety. I know how to code, but haven’t touched Flash outside of building some basic tower defense and platform games, and making website menus and other pretty web related things, in the last 6 years. Right now I am beginning to dive into a project that will need a few things done that I’m not pro enough in to get the job done. That means, I either need to sit down for a long study session and hope that I manage to learn enough to information that I can solve the problems I come across in an attempt to complete yet another project thrown on my plate, or I find someone that also is knowledgable and likes what they do to hop on board and help work on those few pieces that I can’t figure out on my own. Someone that can hear what I’m saying and say, “well then we just need to do ____” and it will work. As I said before, I’m not looking for snippets or someone to write me a game. I’m looking for a partner, someone to assist me.

Sorry I didn’t say all that stuff earlier. I hate having to introduce myself in a text-wall each time I join a new message board and I always feel like I’m being condescending when I do.

I think perhaps we’re a little confused at how you can have made tower defense & platform games etc in actionscript…..but think you’ll struggle with what sounds like very very basic stuff.

@ArreatsChozen

You pretty much have the idea with the game type, and yes, I have a lot more work ahead of me in the damage, defense and pricing categories. I tend to do do all that after a build so I can start from scratch on stats and set my own difficulty level. I just set mine to easy and go from there. Not really the best way to go about it, I know, but I just like the process of fluidly finding levels. This entire game is based on the destruction of the players character between each level, and the input during each of those “levels” is minimal, so my feeling is that the stat system will be fairly simplistic once the first few levels are laid out. That is, however, just a feeling. 0_o

@Ace_Blue
Thanks for the info there. I honestly can’t believe I didn’t think to just call up an object in pieces and upgrade each part individually. That is just the type of stupid thing I would knew I would end up skipping out on. It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything too complex in Flash and I have a lot of holes in my thinking at this point.

So there you go. Maybe I can make a go at this one after all.

So, I give. I’m going to just tackle this myself and see what happens. Feel free to throw anything else out or whatever. I’ll post up when I have something worth posting up.

Originally posted by Amibtious:

I think perhaps we’re a little confused at how you can have made tower defense & platform games etc in actionscript…..but think you’ll struggle with what sounds like very very basic stuff.

Lol. Yeah, how about that.

Originally posted by Amibtious:

I think perhaps we’re a little confused at how you can have made tower defense & platform games etc in actionscript…..but think you’ll struggle with what sounds like very very basic stuff.

He probably had a little help from Walter Reid. xD

Maybe he used a different version of Actionscript.