Wednesday, June 23, 2010

The WeatherMan: Submitted for Competition

Okay, pardon me for not updating the blog lately, but for the past 2 weeks I've been really up to my neck with projects and deadlines. It is therefore with a great sigh of relief that I announced the completion of the WeatherMan project.

Fancy a peek?

I suppose I ought to emphasize it's not a game. Rather, it's a little about telling a story, and a little about conveying a message to the "players".

I've learned a lot from working on this project, especially from the technical perspective, considering it's my first time working on a Bitmap-blitting system (which I really should have done long ago). I've experienced first-hand how transformation of bitmapdata can KILL framerates (and thus stuck to copypixels() thereafter), and for some strange reasons, how the Timer instance didn't quite run at the specified interval it's supposed to run at on Internet Explorer (Firefox seemed fine).

When I headed into development, I was determined to not make sprite sheets for my character sprites. As such, all art assets were completely drawn and animated in the Flash IDE before being cached as BitmapData at run-time. Going all bitmap has yielded consistent framerates but has also made creation of certain "dynamic" game elements (aka in-game cut-scenes?) far more troublesome.

Perhaps a mixture of both vector and bitmap graphics is the way to go for my next project. For now, though, I need a serious break.