Port your game for INSTEAD to flash

In this article i will show you how to port existing game for INSTEAD engine to flash app.
I will port tutorial game (tutorial3), which you can get with INSTEAD sources.

You can read about INSTEAD on its official page or on its Google Code page.

I think it's enough, so let's start.

Background for one of the areas

Plant background

Sketches for new game

Pencil drawing

Vectorized part

INSTEAD(f) v0.0.2

On September 20 i've released 0.0.2 version of INSTEAD.
So, what changed? here's the list:

• My own HTML-like language parser with images support
• Pictures fading
• Support for menu clicks action

Seems that's all, but it was a long way.
Game on Newgrounds
Game on Kongregate 

INSTEAD(f) Postmortem

A few days ago I released the AS3 port of engine for text-based quests INSTEAD.
So, some of the results, the difficulties encountered and future plans.
The biggest problem was to understand how supply embed files to the lua interpreter.
Much easier than I thought.
First create a class that will initialize the VFS:

package
{
    import flash.utils.ByteArray;
    import flash.display.Bitmap;

    public class FS
    {
        [Embed(source='file.lua', mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
        public static const file_lua:Class;

        private static var _filesystemRoot:String;

        public static function filesystemRoot():String
        {
            return _filesystemRoot;
        }

        public static function Init(libInitializer:*):void
        {
            libInitializer.supplyFile("builtin://file.lua",
                          new file_lua() as ByteArray);
            _filesystemRoot = "builtin://";
        }
    }
}

Then we should initialize VFS and lua interpreter:

FS.Init(LuaAlchemy.libInit);
lua = new LuaAlchemy(FS.filesystemRoot());

The problem that I could not solve is to prevent page scrolling when scroll event occurs in flash.

Also had to add some functions in lua wrapper for AS3. The list will add later.

Future plans:

•              implement support of INSTEAD modules;
•              support for pictures in the inventory and main text block;
•              change TextField to something better with html support.

Now the game is on:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/zaynyatyi/the-returning-of-the-quantum-cat
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/574142

Billys moves. Part 1

Jumping. Standing. Walking.
Oh... he is so angry.

Bad Billy and his bad gun :)
New character for my game.

bp_1 diary

I had one big idea in the past.
Decided to proceed with it slowly. Few hours a week.
Here will be full diary of that idea realization, cause that's mmg-groups project.

"Underworld: Defense" Postmortem

That was my fail. My fail - my experience.
On my portal
On newgrounds
On kongregate
Few words about internals of game.
I've decided to use Box2D for boat physics. In first versions that was 2.0.2 version, then i switched to 2.1a (boristhebrave project).
For the first time i used rater graphic for background and vector graphic for boat, buildings, connections and enemies. Performance was awful.
Then i've switched to raster graphic, but in separate objects. That was better, but not enough.
Last graphic performance tweak - use CopyPixels (and draw) method and CacheAsBitmap on vector layer (connections).

Got separate blog for MMG Group related articles

Here will be published games postmortems, announces, links to published material, etc.
Enjoy.