Project Jumper Part 6: Sound; Bleeps Bloops and Frustrated Screams

OK, time to buckle down and get sound sorted out. You guys have no idea how super excited I am this. No idea.

Actually, for the most part it's not too bad. Yeah, Flash only lets you embed mp3 files. But a lot of the time, that'll work just fine, and if the limitations aren't anything that will affect you, then everything is gravy.

Obviously, we're going to need some sounds. Let's make a quick shopping list:

• Background music
• Player jump
• Player death

Project Jumper Part 5: Killing the player, aka Failure Is Always an Option.

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you had the most excellent of holidays. Me, I'm celebrating the new year by getting helmutguy killed.

Incidentally, my original plan for this installment was to get started with sound. On the surface, it seem like it's a straightforward and simple thing to do, right? Make sound, embed the sound into your program, play the sound when appropriate. Done. Simple. If only! It turns out, you can't embed a .wav file into flash! It only supports mp3s. I could just convert all the sounds I make into mp3 format first, but there are certain technical reasons why that's not super great for sound effects. There are workarounds, but I'm going to fiddle around with them and see what works best.

Meanwhile, it's time for danger!

Project Jumper Part 4: Introducing the opposition

It's getting a bit lonely for helmutguy to be running around in the level all by himself. Let's make him some friends to play with. In the spirit of grabbing random things and throwing them at the project, the part of helmutguy's new "friend" will be played by Skel-Monsta. Helmutguy and Skel-Monsta will have so much fun together.

Project Jumper Part 3: I love what you've done with the place

Just a quick bit of poking around this time, making the level bigger and prettier.

First off, I'm using this tileset, which I got from spicypixel.net. I did trim it up a little for use with DAME and flixel, namely using paint.NET to cut out the magenta background and leave it transparent instead.

Also, there's a lot of unused space in the image. I could have trimmed it out. I probably should have, really. But it's not going to hurt anything, so I left it in.

Project Jumper: Interstice

Let's take a little break here, and put together a wishlist of stuff to work on for this "game." A real game would, of course, have a proper design document. But that would suggest a plan, and a vision of a final project, and any desire to prepare ahead of time.

Instead, I'm just going to list some stuff out in no particular order, and cross it off as I get it done, and add new things as I think of them.

I may not get to all of these, and the list isn't very exhaustive, but it does mean that if I don't have anything better in mind, I can just pick something at random off the list and work on that. Direction is a good thing.

Project Jumper Part 2: The bare minimum

Now that we've got our mise en place set up, it's time to actually start making something that works.

This is pretty typically the stage where I panic and quit, so bear with me here.

Anyway, I want to get something that will at least compile and run as quickly as possible. So, I'm going to aim for a single stage for a player sprite to run around on.

Project Jumper Part 1: Let's get organized

Getting started for real this time. This first part is stuff I've done over and over, so it's going to sound more tutorialish than future installments. Don't worry, I won't know what I'm doing much longer.

Anyway, the first thing to do is to pick a platform.

I'm going to go with Flash/Actionscript, because it's pretty similar to what I'm already familiar with, and because with a little fussing it's free. I'm willing to spend exactly $0.00 on this project. While we're at it, I'm going to snag Flixel, just because it looks like a good fit for what I'm trying to do.