Crystal Towers 2 - Flash demo

[davidn]

Yes, I said that it wasn't over yet. But today, I spent my time finally cutting down the first level of Crystal Towers 2 to make it suitable for uploading as a Flash demo as an advert for the full game. That meant replacing the music system (which handled MODs), anything that ever accessed the hard drive (which was everything), and a couple of graphical extensions which don't have Flash equivalents (which I'd happened to use extensively).

It just shows the first level and the types of challenges that you can expect later in the game, along with hopefully directing some traffic back to the full game - you can now play it on Newgrounds.

Tomorrow I am not going to work on anything at all.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

err

theoreticalFrames = (currenttime - gamestarttime) / (1000/60)

:P

and incase it wasn't obvious from context, framesThisGameHasHad is global, i.e. is initialized at program start and sticks around

[davidn]

That's a very neat solution - once again, the Flex framework this is going into doesn't let me in to modifying it at that level, but I can ask how the framework handles frame skipping (if at all) at the moment.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

You shouldn't need its permission as long as you can read the system time accurately! (Err.. assuming that all your logic stems from a single call, which now that I think about it, may not be how clickstuff works..! Phooey..)

But yeah, at the very least, it would probably be easy enough for THEM to implement as a configurable option somewhere :)

[davidn]

Yes, it does (presumably) extend from a single "doLogic()" call, but when to actually execute that is out of my hands - it's what's in that main loop that you set up. In the iPhone runtime you have access to all of this because it sets it up as an XCode project instead of a compiled SWF, which would be fantastic if XCode weren't quite so obtuse.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

eh, it ran fast enough for me.

Pretty excessive, for a flash game. I was surprised that it went beyond the "get to the end of the first level" challenge. That's already longer than most games made in flash : P

Might want to note the controls in game, though. I was sort of smashing buttons until I found one that made the character jump.

[davidn]

I actually updated it this morning with something that I hoped would alleviate it - perhaps it's worked to some extent...! And I'm glad you think that the length's all right - I was actually afraid I was cutting it down far too much compared to what's in the full game.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

It seems to be slightly better, depending on circumstances.... out of curiosity, what did you change?

(Interesting comments; "I'll fix the rest tomorrow", you marvellous bastard..)

[davidn]

It is discouraging to get comments on the graphics because it's the least eye-melting game I've ever made by quite some margin, but you have to go into a different mindset when dealing with people on there. Reception has been poor even by Newgrounds standards, because of that speed problem - I will have to fix it further if I'm going to distribute this on Mochi or anything, because the way it is now, it seems it will have the opposite effect of encouraging people to try the game.

My change was simply to tell some objects (the enemies and their related detectors) to deactivate themselves if they were far away from the window, rather than running all the time no matter how far away from the player they are.