{"author_name":"wilbefast","cat":"LD #27","comments":[{"author_name":"","time":"September 11, 2013 11:06 am","epoch":1378915560,"text":"Thanks for the insights. I’m still thinking about using Haxe\/OpenFL for a smaller project, so this was useful.","spam":"N"}],"epoch":1378659960,"likes":11,"metadata":{"p_key":"37930","p_author":"wilbefast","p_authorkey":"14535","p_urlkey":"73546","p_title":"Jamming with OpenFL","p_cat":"LD #27","p_event":"LD27","p_time":"1378659960","p_likes":"11","p_comments":"1","p_status":"UPD5","us_key":"14535","us_name":"wilbefast","us_username":"wilbefast","event_start":"1377216000","event_key":"18","event_name":"LD27"},"text":"

Time for our post-mortem \":)\"<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

I won’t re-introduce the team, you can go to our “we’re in” post<\/a> for that. Basically there were 3 of us and we’re pretty awesome!<\/p>\n

So what happened?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, we made a time-bending tower-defence game called “10 Second Onslaught”<\/a>. It’s about an onslaught you see, and the onslaught in question lasts 10 seconds:<\/p>\n

\"10<\/a><\/p>\n

The game wasn’t really “finished<\/em>” after 72 hours even though it’s completely playable. I’m actually glad we were over-ambitious though: it’s a good beginning and something I’m still working on (in a separate branch of course \ud83d\ude09 )<\/p>\n

What went well?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

The art pipline was probably the one thing that went particularly well. Thomas is really a 3D artist, so soon reverted back from pixel art to making models and rendering them to bitmaps. To speed things up I wrote a couple of little ImageMagick<\/a> scripts to mirror<\/a> and then stick these images together<\/a> into sheets. Then it was just a matter of using the haxelib spritesheet <\/a>to have animated characters in the game \":)\"<\/p>\n

What went badly?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

For various reasons, mostly the technology (OpenFL<\/a>) being something only I had ever used before, I ended up writing a majority of the code, which is just stupid. Next time we’re going to have to organise ourselves better.<\/p>\n

Read on<\/a> for a rather long discussion of OpenFL, including comparisons to Unity 3D and L\u00f6ve 2D…<\/strong><\/em>
\n <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/h1>\n

OpenFL<\/span><\/h1>\n

Our company NaturalPad<\/a> uses Unity for most of our game projects – here we wanted to try something a bit different: \u201cOpenFL<\/a>\u201d. There\u2019s some degree of patriotism involved as Haxe<\/a> and Motion Twin<\/a> are both French. I’m not actually French myself, but that doesn’t stop me from being patriotic about croissants and stuff<\/strong><\/em>. Anyway you might remember OpenFL (called \u201cNME\u201d until very recently) from such games as Papers Please<\/a> and Rymdkapsel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m told OpenFL resembles Flash, but I\u2019ve never used Flash so I wouldn\u2019t know. Unfortunately developers seem to assume that anyone using OpenFL is already familiar with Flash, so<\/strong> <\/em>their documentation isn\u2019t as complete as it really should be<\/a>. To be fair Joshua Granick<\/a> is always on hand to reply to questions if you ask and, all told, this is my only real qualm with the framework so far. Well, that and the fact that installing it on a non-Ubuntu Linux<\/a> is a serious pain\u2026<\/em><\/div>\n
\"We<\/a>

We started off using Doom-guy and Zergling sprites as place-holders.<\/p><\/div>\n

<\/h1>\n

OpenFL vs. Unity 3D<\/span><\/h1>\n

OpenFL resembles Unity 3D in some senses: its tree-like draw-list structure for instance very much resembles Unity\u2019s transforms. As a result scenes are constructed in the same sort of way, by linking up nodes to parents to form a hierarchy.<\/strong><\/em> That being said Unity is a game engine while OpenFL is just a framework for cross-platform multimedia applications. There are some OpenFL-based game engines out there, HaxeFlixel<\/a> for example.<\/p>\n

While I was happy to be using something lighter and less proprietary there were certain things I missed. Notably:<\/p>\n