I’ve been able to create a very basic game. It has a room, and walls that constrain the main character to that room. The main character is movable using the Arrow keys (though I may change it to WASD) and he even turns to face the direction he’s going using the “Rotate to” behavior. His movement is animated.
This character shoots animated fireballs when the space bar is depressed in whatever direction he’s facing and stop when they hit a wall or another character, and play a sound effect when this happens. Upon collision with a wall or monster, they “explode”, displaying a different animation (more on that later) and playing a different sound.
I created monsters for the character do battle with that spawn every 2-7 seconds, and move to wherever the player is at that moment. They are destroyed when hit by a fireball.
I also added ambient background music (once I’d figured out that it had to be .m4a format).
Sounds nifty, doesn’t it?
Well, there are problems…
- I wanted to fireball to have separate initial, traveling and collision animations. The traveling animation looks right, but the initial and collision animations are buggy. Behaviors like “change scene” and “destroy character” are full-stops; they trump anything that comes before them as soon as they’re executed, no matter what! I wanted the fireball to explode on impact of whatever it struck (and had a specific set of sprites for this animation). After the explosion completed, the fireball actor should be destroyed to remove it from the game field. What’s happening instead is that it’s disappearing immediately after collision. I tried adding a timer, but this is buggy as it continues to display the travel animation on top of the exploding animation, causing the fireball to “hang” for a few seconds before exploding.
- Because of the issue above, I can’t get death animations to work right either. As soon as the monster is struck by a fireball, it disappears immediately. Again, timers don’t seem to help here.
So where does that leave me? Well, I’ll try bringing it up on the forums, but I suspect that this has to do with the fact that I’m using the PC version…I’m not about to go out and buy a Mac just for this one application, nor am I prepared to shell out the $300 GameSalad wants for the Pro version until I’m proficient enough with it to create a working game I’m proud of.
That said, my next step is the forums…
