Bubl @ Artsy Games Incubator
I recently took part in the third round of Toronto’s Artsy Games Incubator. AGI is a multi-session gathering of artsy folks from a variety of disciplines who share an interest in creating their own video games. The Incubator is fostered by author, filmmaker, and all-round talent Jim Munroe. It’s not a programming class but more like an indy gaming clatch.
When I heard about AGI, shortly after its second session had finished, I contacted Jim to get in on this recent round. I have made my own video games in the past. The earliest were back in a very distant Vic-20 days when spending a few hours transcribing machine code from Compute’s Gazette seemed like a brilliant way to spend a Saturday. Much more recently, I have made a casual web games for various client jobs but doing so just for my own exploration and enjoyment has not happened enough.
Joining in with AGI was also a way for me to challenge myself to catch up with Actionscript. I’ve worked with Flash since it was called FutureSplash but my programming skills leveled off with the more procedural scripting of Actionscript 1. This was my chance to set some goals and begin to get my head around the stricter object oriented world of Actionscript 3. I should say that this bucks the goals of AGI just a bit. It’s loose tenets usally mandate using point-and-click game development tools for game creation as a way to familiarize artsy folks with programming concepts before throwing a cold blank text editor at them. But because I had the previous Flash experience it made the most sense for my learning curve.
Fast-forward to today and it’s been a number of weeks since we all introduced this latest crop of Arsty Games as part of the Artcade at this year’s Canzine. My game is called Bubl and I’ve posted the version that was played and presented at the Artcade.
My original concept for Bubl came from the Tomy “Waterful” toys. I thought a game in which the environment was water and the controls were essentially air jets would be really unique. I’d still like to do something closer to that but it isn’t where Bubl ended up. Bubl is an underwater world and I liked the simple twist that suggested to me. The “hero” in Bubl is a pressurized submarine of sorts and I liked the idea that its buoyancy would sort of exert a reverse gravity upon the controls—simply that given no force downward, the craft will just float to the surface of the odd tank in which the Bubl levels take place.
In trying to educate myself about making games with AS3, I came upon a number of great tutorials on tile-based game structures. Because we had also spend time at AGI using the level editing tools in Metanet Software’s awesome game N I wanted to allow myself (and eventually anyone) to build Bubl levels by creating my own level editing system. The tutorials of Tonu Paldra (aka Tonypa) and Emanuele Feronato are the foundation of what I’ve learned so far.
I’ll close this here but I’ll continue with further posts as I continue to work on Bubl. My next goal is altering the code to accept external level files generated by the editor, keep squashing game bugs, and to add some further fun and complexity to Bubl’s interaction with the other game items (sound, animation,explosions). I’ll also post all of the source files so far next time around so that Bubl is available to whoever else can learn something from it.
