Having spent most of my time thus far developing Anthem with the Flash 9 Alpha, I hadn’t yet tried using Components (Because the Flash 9 Alpha didn’t support them), and I was hesitant to try them, because they seemed fairly complex for what I wanted to do with them.

I just did a bit of research, and it turns out they’re incredibly easy to set up, and incredibly useful for making levels.

It’s as simple as right clicking on a MovieClip in the library, going to “Component Definition…”, filling in the “Class” field, and adding some Parameters.

Once that’s set up, you can drag that MovieClip from the library, and with it selected on the stage, go to the Parameters panel and adjust any of the Parameters you exposed, for that instance.

For example, I can open up a level MovieClip, drag an enemy from the library on to the level, select that instance and adjust it’s health, move speed, reaction speed, damage multiplier, or whatever. And aside from making enemy instances unique, it’s very useful for setting up stuff like triggers, enemy spawners, and whatever else you can think of.

Might not seem like much, but this will make things a lot easier for both content creation, and programming. Wish I’d tried it earlier. (:

-Matt

If you don’t know what Anthem is, I suggest you check out Gel’s blog, which has a bit more info on the game itself (Gel is Anthem’s designer and artist). But if you’d prefer a quick summary (stolen from the design doc), it’s a fast-paced 2d side-scrolling, platform-based melee action game. Oh, and it’s a flash game, but hopefully you won’t notice, unless you’re playing it in your browser. (:

Anyway, Hi, this is just an intro post, when I have a bit more time I’ll post some juicy info about Anthem and the engine powering Anthem, and programming Anthem and all that.

Should be good.

For now though, here’s a photo of where I work, and basically live.

(click for full image)

Design doc always open on the left monitor, Flash CS3 on the middle one, and SE|PY ActionScript Editor on the right (I don’t know what I’d do without SE|PY, seriously).

Also, I downloaded this c/c++/c# line counter today, and modified it to look for .as files and ran it on my Anthem directory.

(click for full image)

Not sure if 3875 lines of code is a lot (for a flash game in development) or anything (not that a lot of code is necessarily a good thing, a lot of code can mean all sorts of bad things, like duplicate code, or even worse: slow, bulky, unoptimized code!), but I thought it would be interesting to see how much the code base grows in the next month leading up to the deadline, after roughly 8 months of on/off (mostly off) development. And if the comment:code ratio starts to drop as the deadline nears.

Feel free to leave a comment, it should work without having to register or anything.

Cheers,

-Matt