WaveMachine: This is the class that the main game loop will call upon to spawn a new wave of enemies at the required intensity level. It will take in an array of waves to use. This way if I want a level that only features a subset of all the waves in the game I can do it easily.
The main part of this class is the spawn random wave function, it will pick a wave at random from it’s collection and spawn it with the required intensity.

IWave: This is the interface that the WaveMachine class will use to interact with it’s collection of waves.
The intensity parameter allows me to tweak how intense / hard a wave is. For example a surround wave of intensity 10 would only have a few enemies spawned in a large rough circle around the player. On the opposite end of the scale an intensity 80 surround wave would spawn a larger number of enemies in a tighter circle closer to the player.

Wave Classes: The wave classes are each a specific implementation of a particular wave pattern. For example the corner wave will spawn enemies in the each corner of the screen, while the surround wave will spawn enemies in a circle around the player.

IVoidSpriteFactory: Each wave takes an IVoidSpriteFactory parameter. This interface hides the implementation of generating a sprite for use in the wave. So by changing the sprite factory implementation I can vary what enemies are spawned for any wave pattern.

Object pool: Constantly creating sprites in Flash can be a performance hit. One way to optimize this to use the object pool pattern. The object pool is filled with sprites ready to be used. Once you are finished using the object it is recycled back into the pool. Currently it is not know how hectic the spawn rate will be and if object pooling would be need or even if it would help. Since it will interface to the waves by the IVoidSpriteFactory I can implement object pooling later then test and measure the performance.

VoidSprite: This is base class for all sprites in Void Intruders.

So that is the overall design for Void Intruders wave machine. I think it will be flexible enough to allow any combination of sprites to any wave attack pattern. It will be interesting to see how to design survives a real world implementation.

Step 1:
Embed an image into the FlashDevelop project.
I have written a tutorial on how to do this here: Embed an image with Haxe and FlashDevelop tutorial.

Step 2:
Wrap the bitmap in a sprite.

A bitmap will not respond to a mouse click event. The simple solution to this is to create a sprite and add the bitmap as a child of the sprite.

var sprite:Sprite;
sprite = new Sprite();
sprite.addChild(new Bitmap(new ExampleBitmapData(),
    flash.display.PixelSnapping.AUTO, false));
flash.Lib.current.addChild(sprite);

Step 3:
Bind the sprite’s on click event to a function.

sprite.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, SpriteClicked);

Step 3:
Handle the sprite clicked event.

For the sprite MouseEvent.Click to be handled you will need an event handler with the following signature.

function SpriteClicked(event:MouseEvent) : Void

Step 4:
Open the url on click.

Now that the sprite has a function bound to it’s mouse click event we can simply open a url in the event handler function. Haxe has a library function for opening url’s called getURL. It takes a URLRequest object as an argument.

Here is a simple example of opening a url.

flash.Lib.getURL(new URLRequest("http://xlandersoftware.com"), "_blank");

Example:




Download Example Project

Software Versions Used:

• FlashDevelop 3.0.5
• Haxe 2.03
• Flash 10

The contest theme is a game that is over in 60 seconds or less. So you have 60 second to find a pixel hidden on the screen, each click you make will give you a hint as to how close you are to the pixel.

The game was written over a week of spare time and is my first Mochi game written in Haxe using FlashDevelop.

The nice graphics where taken from the graphic set released for the Play with your peas prototype challenge by Danc at LostGarden. Go check out his site it has a lot of good stuff.

Step 1:

Import an image into your FlashDevelop project. You can do in one of two ways.

• Drag an image from Windows Explorer onto the project tree in FlashDevelop.
• Right click the project tree, select Add, select Existing File and then select an image.

If you have imported the image correctly you will see it listed in the project tree in FlashDevelop as in this picture.

Step 2:

Adding the image to the asset library.

Adding the image to the asset library tells FlashDevelop to embed the asset into the Flash application.

1. Right click the image in the project tree.
2. Select Add To Library

If you have successfully added the image to the asset library it will display with blue text in the project tree.

Step 3:

Create an image class.

To be able to access the image Haxe needs a class that extends BitmapData for the embedded image to reference. This is the class you use in your code as a BitmapData object.

1. Right click your project and select Add, New Class
2. Name the class FishBitmapData.hx
3. Declare the class to extends BitmapData
4. class FishBitmapData extends BitmapData { public function new() { super(0, 0); } }

Step 4:

Reference the image class from the embedded image.

The FishBitmapData class needs to be able to reference the embedded image, this is done by setting the image id in the asset library.

1. Right click the image in the project tree.
2. Select Options
3. Select the Advanced tab
4. Uncheck the “Auto generate id for attachMovie();” option
5. Enter a full class name in the text box underneath. “com.xlandersoftware.embeddedimage.FishBitmapData”
6. Check the embed as Bitmap instead of Clip option.

Step 5:

Create a bitmap.

Create a new Bitmap using the embedded image as the BitmapData and add it to the stage.

var bitmap:Bitmap;
bitmap = new Bitmap(new FishBitmapData(), flash.display.PixelSnapping.ALWAYS, false);
flash.Lib.current.addChild(bitmap);

Example:




Download Example Project

Credits:

The fish picture comes from “Fishing Girl” art by Daniel Cook (Lostgarden.com)

Software Versions Used:

• FlashDevelop 3.0.5
• Haxe 2.03
• Flash 10

Step 1:

Import a true type font into your FlashDevelop project. You can do in one of two ways.

• Drag a font from Windows Explorer onto the project tree in FlashDevelop.
• Right click the project tree, select Add, select Existing File and then select a font.

If you have imported the font correctly you will see it listed in the project tree in FlashDevelop as in this picture.

Step 2:

Adding the font to the asset library.

Adding the font to the asset library tells FlashDevelop to embed the asset into the Flash application.

1. Right click the font in the project tree.
2. Select Add To Library

If you have successfully added the font to the asset library it will display with blue text in the project tree.

Step 3:

Give the font a friendly name.

Now that the font is embedded in our application we are able to use it in our code. By default FlashDevelop tends to give library assets long names, how ever it is very easy to give assets more friendly names.

1. Right click the font in the project tree.
2. Select Options
3. Select the Advanced tab
4. Uncheck the “Auto generate id for attachMovie();” option
5. Enter a friendly name in the text box underneath.

Step 4:

Display some text.

The TextField and TextFormat are the classes needed to display the text on the screen with a custom font.  Create a TextFormat object and set the font field to the friendly name that you gave your font in step 3.

textFormat.font = “Rexlia”;

Next create a TextField object. Set the embedFonts field to true and then set the defaultTextFormat field to the TextFormat object you created earlier. Add it to your stage as per normal and you should now see some text on the screen using the embedded font.

textField.embedFonts = true;
textField.defaultTextFormat = textFormat;
flash.Lib.current.addChild(textField);

Example:




Download Example Project

Software Versions Used:

• FlashDevelop 3.0.5
• Haxe 2.03
• Flash 10