Intermission

Ugh. Must... program...harder......

For my next programming project I've tackled something way more ambitious than that last "game", and I'm starting to feel like I bit off more than I can chew. I don't want to give away too much, but I'm essentially making a Bust-a-Move (aka Snood) variant. one of the things that is different is that the screen is really tall, to the extent that you'd have to scroll up the page in which the game is embedded while you're playing to keep up with your progression. I thought this would be a funny format for the blog, but some issues are coming up that seem to illustrate why nobody makes games in this way.

Let's just put it this way: your browser's Flash player is not exactly a PS3. There's a limit to the number of sprites that can be moving or even displayed on the screen each frame without massive slow-down. This is a problem because the way I'd designed it, the game started with a 37 by 14 array of bubbles to be busted, which the game has to iterate through and move each individual bubble for every frame of the animation. Right now, I see three possible fixes for this:

• Instead of moving all the bubbles every frame, I can make a timer and move them down a row every couple of seconds. This is how it works in Bust-a-Move and Snood anyway. I'm afraid that this won't fix the lag problem, though, because the game will still have to display a ton of bubbles.
• I can give up the dream and decrease the height of the game window, so that new content generates and disappears as you scroll up. D'oh.
• I can try to make the cluster of bubbles one glacially moving monolithic sprite, and then use my two-dimensional array to store information about each part of the grid rather than storing an actual Object. This feels like the best solution to me, but also sounds like the hardest to implement.

 That's where I am right now. What should I do? Should I just give up the idea of an epically tall game? Would that be annoying? Or should I try the one-big-sprite fix? Help me!

And since I feel obligated to post content, here's the first game I designed in my class at Vassar. It makes the last thing I posted look like less of an achievement, but this one was made using a Flash game designing add on rather than from scratch. Some of it won't make sense outside of the context of the class, so sorry about that. The point of the game is that you can't beat it without "cheating." I'm not telling you how, though. That's the game part.

[Sorry! The game has been moved here: Wallhacker]

CONTROLS: Arrow keys to move, space bar to shoot.

Featuring music by artists including Big Black, Microdisney, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, and Earth Wind and Fire. Enjoy!

nathan