Open Thread: Got any questions?

On various forums and such, I always see questions about how to get the basics of programming working. I thought I'd just leave a spot here for people who are trying to follow along with Project Jumper, but are still confused.

So, go for it. Is there anything in Jumper that I've done that you don't understand? Anything I covered too quickly? Even basic stuff that I haven't covered at all?

Organizing your game

Not too long ago, I mentioned how neat it was that FlxG has properties on it that you can access from any of your classes, like FlxG.score and FlxG.state. I was considering making my next update all about how to use that concept to your advantage, but someone's already beaten me to it. Photon Storm has a new post up that covers everything I would have said, so you should probably just go there and read it. :D

Side Project: Loading and Saving local files

For a side project I'm working on, I need to make a map editor, since my data will be structured in a way that's not really convenient when using DAME or whatever. That, and it's a good learning experience.
In any case, I need to be able to load and save .xml files that are stored locally on my harddrive. Apparently, this used to be a huge pain in the neck to do with Flash, and I should probably be doing this sort of project in AIR anyway, but it turns out there's a fairly way to do this.
NOTE: You have to be using Flash Player 10 for this to work.

Project Jumper Part 12: Odds and Ends

Things are almost starting to look like an actual game at this point. In fact, I'm almost not embarrassed to show people the product to date. From here on out, I'm going to try to keep the most current version of the game up on Kongregate, mostly just to try and give it a little more visibility. I'll still be posting the incremental versions as well, so nothing's changing there.

A few posts ago, evgeny asked about integrating flash movieclips into flixel, and about multiplayer. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm going to be covering either of those in much depth, if at all, for a couple different reasons.

Multiplayer is a great thing, but it's actually fairly tricky to pull of in Flash. Basically, it's all about how you get the players communicating with each other. The most direct way is have both players' clients talk directly to each other, like a direct IP connection or your classic LAN game or something. Unfortunately, Flash doesn't really provide the tools to make this feasible. Another way to do it is the client-server model, where each player's client dials in to a central server to get the data it needs. This actually does work, but it requires you to actually have a server, and that's a little beyond the scope of this tutorial, I think.

As for integrating movieclips, actually that doesn't seem like a terribly hard thing to do. The only thing is that I don't have the actual Flash development tools, nor am I likely to get them any time soon, nor do I really know how to create/animate vector art in general. So, really, I'm just not the person to be asking! If you want to go about it, maybe start with this code snippet on FlashGameDojo, and run from there.

If someone either has a good tutorial on either of these topics, or would like to write one, feel free to let me know so I can either the tutorial up here or provide a link or whatever.

OK, time to start tweaking things!

Project Jumper Part 11: They're Everywhere!

A new rivalry is born!

You know, there's a great bit play area here; it's way to much for even the most epic of duels between helmutguy and Skel-monsta. We need to add a little more danger to the world. To that end, it's time to give Skel-monsta some friends.