The number of tools and market avenues available to every game developer have grown exponentially over the last few years, long gone are the days where your only valid choices for programming games where C++ and Windows.

Over the years we experimented with several languages, frameworks and IDE’s, eventually settling with ActionScript 3 and Flash Develop for most of our current development needs. It allows us to rapidly prototype ideas and to target multiple platforms while keeping 99% of our codebase intact.

We wanted to give back to community, and one of the ways is a series of guides teaching how to code a game in AS3, our way. This guide, like all others in this series, is aimed at those with at least some experience in programming and a passion for making games.

Step one, installing the IDE.

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Origins “Part I” ended with us (Isabel really) having coded a “nonogram” puzzle solver. Writing a program that solves a puzzle for you may seem strange, but the truth is that you are simply creating an even more interesting challenge for yourself.

One of the most remarkable features of this kind of puzzle is that you progressively reveal a “pixel art” image as you play. However, a proper puzzle of this kind is more than a pretty picture, the underlying image must follow several constraints that ensure that each puzzle has a single, logic-driven solution. Ambiguity will make a puzzle very frustrating (and often impossible) to solve.

While playing similar games we found that the few that had user-generated content didn’t check for these issues beforehand, instead relying on users to try (and fail) to solve a puzzle to report them as not valid, hardly an ideal situation.

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What’s that?

A long running process is, well, a piece of code that takes a long time to complete. Like our Picma validator, complex procedural level generation, or even something as “simple” as counting to infinity (or at least as far as an int will take you). Let’s use the last one as an example, the code is pretty straightforward:

function count():void {
    var i:int = 0;
    while (i < int.MAX_VALUE)
        trace(i++);
}

I would advise against testing that code, unless you want your Flash player to freeze and then crash with a Script Time Out error.

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Picture Enigmas, more commonly known as “Picma” was the first game we created as an independent game studio. Fittingly, this is also the first post I make on our brand new blog.

We have since re-written and updated the original game (and will continue to do so) but we are still extremely proud of what we accomplished in Picma. (You can find the most recent version at our Kaetheryan Chronicles website.)

Over a few posts I will attempt to tell of how Picma came to be, which is in a way the story of how Moonberry Studios itself started. Hopefully it will be at least mildly interesting to fledgling developers and players alike. If not, no refunds on those last 2 minutes of your life.

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