When I set out to write a class to simplify game input control in ActionScript 3, I started from the assumption that Adobe AIR’s GameInput device control ids (the ids that relate to each button or axis) would be fairly consistent between platforms. The idea was that the class would just hide away the Keyboard […]

Adobe Scout is Adobe’s most excellent profiler for Flash (web and AIR) content. Although it’s a somewhat recent application, it has easily become my go-to tool for measuring and optimizing performance of Flash content. It’s truly an invaluable resource for doing things like detecting memory leaks and performance hiccups, and something that should be used […]

Super ellipses. If you’re of the mathematical type, they are a geometric figure defined in the Cartesian coordinate system as the set of all points (x, y) with (x/a)ⁿ + (y/b)ⁿ = 1 where n, a and b are positive numbers. If you’re everyone else, they are those fancy rounded corners used in icons for […]

When testing my latest game prototype, I realized I needed certain player inputs to be time-sensitive, that is, only be acceptable if they were activated within a certain time limit. This is useful for one specific condition: jumping. In my game prototype, I had my jump activation checks like so: function gameLoop():void { // Calculate […]

As it should be obvious based on recent posts in this blog, my latest AS3 game prototype thing is a platformer-ish kind of game that uses Nape for physics. I’ve been mentally debating how to approach level design for this game for quite some time. For a while, I was using the R.U.B.E. Box2D Editor for […]

Last weekend was the 27th edition of the game development jam Ludum Dare. The theme for this competition was “10 seconds”. As usual, I contributed with a game of my own – something called Hijack Humans Hastily. It was an AS3 game (made with Nape and Starling) in which the objective was to use a […]