I’m also thinking of removing the band hosting service on The Music Tank as there’s absolutely no way I can compete against MySpace (may it only be bandwidth-wise). Nonetheless, I might try to make a CMS out of the existing code not to make it a complete waste of time and energy. We’ll see in time how it morphs.

The priority however will be completing the ROTE game in a decent amount of time. Already, I’ve come to the conclusion I’d really need help making the game’s graphics. I can give you details of where the game is headed if you want to share your graphical talent with me by drawing isometric tiles for the game (or by drawing the sprites).

For about 2 years now, I wanted to make a full blown flash game. I’ve done a few unfinished sketches, have tried to build an adventure game engine, then I tried doing an RPG engine, then followed a simulation game, and then I tried making an RPG again. Hell, I even tried to make a hockey game.

Do I even need to say making a real flash game it’s hard as hell?

That’s without mentioning the common cliché of Real Life catching up and forcing me to put my projects on the ice for a while. Also, just like any project you do without thinking thoroughly before beginning, after a while you start noticing how the programming sucks, how the same thing could be done in a much simpler way and all that depressing crap.

Well! Now I feel like going at it again. Though I don’t know how much time it’ll take me, I have decided on continuing Rise of the Espers (read: start it over again). This RPG is meant to be similar than those of the SNES and should be a mix between Final Fantasy 3 and Secret Of Mana. We’ll see how that will go!

Of course, you can’t quite tackle a task like that without help. Even if I’ll probably end up making everything myself, I will need the help of those with more “mathematical” minds that mine. It was by asking Evilmax help on how I could generate an isometric map dynamically that he came up with the idea of having me publish the game’s progress. Without further ado, here’s the first post in a long series in the Rise Of The Espers: The Making of.

“Let there be light”

Here is a screenshot of the game’s architecture at the moment. The Game.as file is where I will be handling the game’s interface (new game menu, options menu, save, etc). The Map.as class will generate the map using data from an XML file and by creating a Tile.as object per each texture tile.

Utils.as is a file I’ve been using for a while in many of my projects. I store usefull static functions in there like the event handlers.

game.fla is an empty file with only a call to the Game.as’ constructor in the actions layer of the first frame.

The map itself is created from an xml file that contains arrays of numbers which are each associated with a image in the game.fla texture pack. For performance issues, the texture images are likely to be pixel images and not drawn in Flash.

The game.fla file does more than it is supposed to be doing at the moment. As the project grows in maturity, game.fla will handle game menus, pauses, server connections and whatnot. To continue loading the maps, I will create another placeholder movie where only Map instances are created. This map movie loader will be loaded from game.fla using the loadMovie() command.

Extensive use of the Progress bar control warns of data transfers delays but is also used with each heavy loops, like the one that creates the tiles. While you don’t even see them when I start the game from my desktop, they will be much appreciated on the web. I also use the alert component to raise error messages.

And that’s where I stand at the moment, the movie loads a simple map of two textures dynamically. The next step will be to draw the main textures and build a quick interface in flash through which I will be able to save my arrays automatically, and not have to learn all the texture codes by heart.