Today I’m starting to blog about the development of Stop, Ampeltime!. Or TrafficSim2, as the project is called internally. Why 2? Because it’s a new chapter, and a new beginning in many ways.
Stop, Ampeltime! in the form that it exists in now was entirely designed and programmed during my studies for game design. It began in the second semester as a project for the Flash/Action Script module and ended up being my bachelor’s thesis at the end of the three years of studies.
The project itself was very interesting and fun to make. And it required a lot of thinking, planning, writing of code, rewriting of code, re-designing of whole ideas. Well, the re- part of things was not planned, of course. But every redesign was necessary to get to the point the game is now. For a long time, I thought that using Flash as a game engine was the right thing to do. It felt cool, because many people don’t like it (despite they use it a lot, unwittingly). Like the underdog of game engines. Well, not exactly, because there are tons of Flash games out there. But not many that go deeper or are more complex than arcade games. I thought that Stop, Ampeltime! could be one of these games that stand out. Now I know that this was kinda silly. Flash has its restrictions, and I knew of them from the beginning. But it was not until the end of the bachelor’s thesis that I was fed up enough to decide to switch engines.
So now this is what I’m doing. Saying goodbye and farewell to Flash and switching over to… C++. I hope that a lot of the ideas in the original Action Script code can be used more or less in the same way in C++, because I created some nice OO structures. And if not, I try to make the best out of it and re-engineer the code for the better.
What am I hoping for the switch to bring?
– faster speed in general
– benefits from multithreading
– better graphics (a blog entry covering the choice of graphics/game engine will come soon)
– more build targets (without the whole Flash being a requirement thing)
So I hope this is the right direction that I’m going in. Further developing in Flash certainly didn’t feel right!
