The last time I posted something about The Undergrounder was the 2010, 5 months ago, it’s been a long time!
In the last few months I mostly worked on the story mode of the game, or the main game, and last week I released the first beta build in 4 months, so I decided to write this post to show to the people not involved with the testing what’s going on with the game.
This is the first post of the 2011, so I decided to go with something interesting and useful: a complete guide about how to make a simple game with Actionscript 3/Flashdevelop and about how to improve and monetize it thanks the services offered by Mochimedia.
Even if I tried to keep everything as much simple as possible, making a game is not like making a “hello world” program, so I had to divide this guide into 3 parts.
The first part describes the project and introduces the base classes making the game, the second part is about the main code and the third part is about the integration with the Mochimedia API.
I’m also going to release the source code with the last post, so keep reading every week and further! 
The game we’re gong to make is called Swifty Chips (thanks to Afrix for the suggestion):
As you may notice, the game is pretty simple. There’s no main menu, no levels selection and you can only play with the mouse, nevertheless the immediate gameplay and the 8 different leaderboards (one for each level) should give enough challenge for a quick play.
One last note: this tutorial is intended for people who already have a basic knowledge about programming and Actionscript 3.
If you have no idea about basic concepts like: class, attribute, cycle, branch, inheritance, etc… I’d strongly suggest you to learn the fundamentals before to read this tutorial.
Continue reading
I have to admit this wasn’t the first tutorial I’ve drafted when I decided to start this series about game development with AS3/Flash, but as a friend pointed me out, some people will start reading these tutorials with very little knowledge (or no knowledge at all) about how to make a flash game, so the best way to start the series is suggesting to them how to start.
In this tutorial I’m going to explain to you how to set up a working environment for making Flash games and to give you some links to useful resources.
This first tutorial is not going to be technical, so no particular knowledge is required, but here you’re going to find a list of all the tools you’ll need to make a Flash game.
I’ve always considered writing about technical topics because it’s probably the best way to learn and master any subject, that’s one of the reasons why I’ve decided to start a series of tutorials about game development with Actionscript 3, the language behind Flash games and applications.
Another reason for my decision is my belief in open source and free knowledge. As I’ve been helped a lot of times by tutorials and documents I found on the internet, I want to give something back to the community and hopefully help somebody to improve him/herself a bit.
It’s been a month since my last post, in the meantime we started the closed-beta and now we are providing new Windows, Mac and Linux builds to testers every week. I guess that’s the main reason for the silence here.
Managing 3 different builds, interacting with testers and trying to make progress with the game every week is not that easy!
Nevertheless yesterday I decided it was time to show something more about the current state of the game. I also wanted to test the latest stable kdenlive (open-source video editing tool), so I decided to make a quick video showing the level editor integrated into the game and how the gamer can easily play a just-made level in few seconds.
The closed beta will be announced in few days, but now it’s time to show you the progress made during the last month of development.
The development in the last 3 weeks has been focused on two main features: fullscreen visualization and multiple resolutions support.
The coding part took less than few days, whereas remaking all the graphics for all the available resolutions took most of the 3 weeks. That was pretty boring, but it also allowed to improve some elements, especially the game GUI, so it’s all good.
Anyway, now it’s possible to change the visualization mode and resolution from the options window and no restart of the game is required (as several games do).
After we posted the first screenshots 6 weeks ago we started to realize we were probably heading to the wrong way with the graphic style.
The overall appearance was not too bad, and we got lot of positive feedbacks, but we also got some critics and we agreed with most of them, especially considering we were trying to merge 2 different styles and usually that’s just wrong. So we decided to revisit our graphic style and go for something more uniform and coherent.
Unfortunately the revisiting process took more time than expected, but we’re pretty satisfied of the results and in the meanwhile I made a lot of progress with the gameplay code, so I’m proud to announce you the game is now in the private BETA stage. Basically that means we have a full playable level and we’re going to test it well before starting the closed BETA that will be open to non-team members.
It required a lot of work and a lot of time, but at last the game is close to enter in the beta stage of development, so now I can show you the first in-game screenshots from the latest alpha build!
The first screenshot shows the game few seconds after I started the level.
This is the first update about the game since I left my day-job in the game industry and started my full-time career as indie developer, not surprisingly, a lot changed in the last 2 months for both my life and the game, but don’t worry, this blog post will be about the game only
Even if there are a lot of changes under the hood I can’t show and discuss here, I’m happy to introduce you the level editor BETA 4, featuring a new path editing system for trains, and a brand new graphic style.
