Volvo S60 Pinball game – Things I learnt

As I mentioned earlier, this is my first game project. If you have not checked it out, please do. I had so much to learn from this project. Here is a breakdown of the new stuff I ended up using:

Box2DFlash

Box2DFlash is the best available physics engine for flash in my opinion. I had looked into APE (ActionScript Physics Engine) and Fisix Engine briefly before I finally decided to go ahead with Box2DFlash. It is basically an ActionScript3 version of an opensource physics engine Box2D developed by Erin Catto. The main reason which got me going with it was the richness, the details and the controls it offered me. If you are looking for a list of different physics engines available for ActionScript, Henry Jones has written a nice blog covering almost all of them. The examples right there on the homepage of Box2DFlash, show you the capabilities of this engine. But I have to say, setting up and then getting along is quite difficult with it. This is where QuickBox2D comes in.

QuickBox2D

QuickBox2D is basically a wrapper around Box2DFlash. Zevan Rosser, the guy who created QuickBox2D puts it rightly:

The main purpose of this library is to significantly simplify instantiation of rigid bodies and provide a simple way to skin rigid bodies with custom graphics.

If you are looking for a comparison of what a simple task with Box2DFlash would look like with that of QuickBox2D, Emanuele Feronato has written a blog tutorial using QuickBox2D and a tutorial done earlier using Box2DFlash alone. It clearly shows you how easy it is to setup Box2DFlash when used with QuickBox2D.

There is a very well-written tutorial on tutsplus which covers QuickBox2D from ground up. This series on tutsplus covers most of the basic stuff for this library but at the time of this writing, the third in the series is yet to come. Plus to understand skinning, Zevan Rosser has written this entry and for contacts (collision detections), this series of posts on his blog or just search the term “contacts” on his blog and you will see many results. For the different forces I had applied on this game on various spots, from handles, to spring, from tunnel to roads, this entry helped me understand better the available forces in Box2DFlash.

I highly recommend that if you decide to use Box2DFlash, QuickBox2D should be used alongside. The only thing is, I am really hoping QuickBox2D keepgs getting updated to be used with the latest version of Box2DFlash. I did not miss any features but it would be very nice if both the libraries update on a regular basis.

Robotlegs

I had been thinking of starting to get into frameworks and all. Tried and worked with PureMVC on a couple projects but in this project I (based on a lot of hubbub over internet) used Robotlegs. And it was a good decision I made.

This whole idea of wiring the objects together, the events channeling through the application, model being updated only by commands, seperate Service actor for all external communications and view living its life all alone (decoupled) is so good. I absolutely loved Robotlegs. To understand better this framework, somewhere in the middle of this slideshare by Joel Hooks, he explains the workings of this framework. Plus this hello world video tutorial by John Lindquist explains quite a bit about the framework. Then on InsideRIA, there is an introductory series by Joel Hooks starting off with the basic question, what is Robotlegs?. Then ofcourse, the robotlegs community is so quick in responses. Robotlegs just clicked.

SFXR

And just when I was in need of sound effects for my game, I saw this blog post by Keith Peters. SFXR lets you create sound effects and provides extensive control over the sound you want to generate. It then exports the sound in WAV format. There is an ActionScript3 port of the same (mentioned in Keith Peter’s blog’s comments).

Facebook ActionScript3 SDK

I used the new Facebook ActionScript3 SDK for the share with facebook functionality of the game. This api is updated by talented developers at gskinner.com so you expect quality and quality it is. I can finally say that the troubles of working for Facebook with ActionScript are over.

Overall, I had a nice experience building this game. I had been thinking of doing a game for quite some time but just was not getting any opportunity. But now that I did, I am happy with the results.

Phew! long post haan? Check out the game.