Category Archives: mochiads

Terrain Modification Tutorial Thumbnail

This part deals with the implementation of the moving nodes method (Part 2) from one dimension to the pseudo 3D landscape and begins with the movie itself for you to test what it does.
Just hover through the landscape and lift single nodes with a mouse click. Neither am I gone further by implementing lowering nodes nor did I hide the mouse cursor and the green pointer. The first one would have (additionally) increased the number of code lines in this post without adding relevant information. Hiding the cursor would have brought the movie closer to a final state but at the moment it is the method that counts.
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Posted in as3, flash, game development, grids, mochiads, Terrain Modification, Tutorial | Tagged | Comments Off on Terrain Modification in Grid Based Games – Part 3: Active Landscaping
Terrain Modification Tutorial Thumbnail

In this part of the terrain modification tutorial I will show you how to move single nodes and their neighbors if necessary. To begin at a smaller scale I will not use a multi-row grid but a line of nodes instead.
Every node in a line will have two neighbors (except for the outer ones of course).
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Posted in as3, flash, grids, mochiads, Terrain Modification, Tutorial | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Terrain Modification in Grid Based Games – Part 2: Moving Nodes
Terrain Modification Tutorial Thumbnail

This appendix is part of the terrain modification tutorial series and holds information about the dynamic creation and drawing of tiles.
The different tile styles presented are some sort of tribute to great old games like Populous and SimCity and their differences in tile design.
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Posted in as3, flash, grids, mochiads, Terrain Modification, Tutorial | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Terrain Modification in Grid Based Games – Appendix A: Dynamic Tiles
Terrain Modification Tutorial Thumbnail

Target of this tutorial is the development of a scrolling isometric tile map where the terrain can be manipulated. Inspiration for a test like this were Populous and SimCity with their respective methods of terrain manipulation. While Populous lets the player change the height of a single node (forming a pyramid), SimCity always pushes the whole tile. The challenge here is that node’s heights can only be altered in dependency of their adjacent nodes.
This part deals with the creation of a tile map displaying the isometric map with terrain.
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Posted in as3, flash, grids, mochiads, Terrain Modification, Tutorial | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

As a follow up to the rather pessimistic first year review I experienced something that rewarded my efforts. The following is a little story in pictures just to show you the influence that one big portal can have on your earnings.
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Posted in mochiads, monetization, xperiment | 3 Comments

Well, I have seen a lot of success stories in the flash game business. Most of them are stories about the one big hit game, the holy grail for every developer. Hmm, haven’t found mine so far but I discovered that I am pretty more interested in the search.
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Posted in game development, mochiads, monetization, xperiment | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Alright, the most important part of that mazing type tower defence game must be the pathfinding. Completely different from the given path games, a constant ‘re-pathing’ is neccessary. What we’ll do here is the basic thing. A backwards pathfinding with all nodes to create a flowfield. Heuristics are included to later check if there is a possible path (using the shortest path). There is a number of end nodes taken into account but only one start node yet. Creeps will later use the given direction of the node they are on.

Here is what we are going to create, have a little test:

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Posted in as3, flash, Grid Based Games, grids, mochiads | Tagged , , , , , | 17 Comments

This post enhances the previous post by the ability of actually placing obstacles which somewhen may become towers.
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Posted in Grid Based Games, grids, mochiads | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I know this may look like a call to clone. But the intention of this post is more like look and learn. Once you can do the same, make it better. We’ll have a look at Desktop Tower Defence and try to understand the basic methods of that game.
This post will cover the creation of the square grid in different colors and a method to obtain the actual position to build a tower.
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Posted in as3, flash, Grid Based Games, grids, mochiads | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

I played a bit with the settlers-like map of that post to give it a more like terrain look. Therefore the triangle faces are colored now depending on their orientation.
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Posted in as3, flash, game development, Grid Based Games, grids, mochiads | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Grid based games – Part X.1: Hexmaps and terrain