Fast Game Prototyping with Flashpunk and Minimal Comps

The proper way to build a game in Actionscript (or any other language) is to create a quick prototype and test the gameplay. Then, if the gameplay is good, you refine it. If it isn’t working, you go back to the drawing board and create another prototype. Large game companies often scrap ideas that aren’t working when the prototype is tested.

In reality, it oftens takes so much time to get the basic mechanics working that you would never consider scrapping it, even if it isn’t really a good game. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. Two issues that slow down game development are:

#1: Dealing with basic input/output, collision detection and all of the “simple” things that you need to make a game function. Coding these elements takes hours and has very little to do with making your game awesome.

#2: Fine tuning your game. There are usually several inter-related variables that need to be adjusted. The (slow) way to do this is to make an educated guess, set the values, publish and test. Then, adjust the variable values and try again.

The good news is that there are solutions to both of these problems. The solution to problem #1 is Flashpunk. It’s an open-source AS3 framework for building pixel-based 2D games. It handles a lot of the basic animation, collision detection, keyboard input and other issues so that you don’t have to do it. It’s a pure Actionscript-based library that compiles in FlashDevelop, which is free and open source, so you don’t even need the Flash IDE. I whipped up a sample “game” in Flashpunk below. This only took me a few hours, including the learning curve.

“But, I’m making an “immersive 3D RPG for iPhone” you say? So what? You can still use Flashpunk to do some quick gameplay demos and make sure that your basic gameplay is actually fun. Once you get the hang of Flashpunk, you can whip up a simple game demo in less than a day. It may save you a lot of time down the road. Go here to get the source code and then work through the tutorials. You can be making games by the end of the day.

Now, if you tried my game demo above, you are probably saying “this sucks! I can’t even jump up to the platforms!” That’s where my second time saver comes in. Minimal Comps is a set of basic Actionscript3 components that can help you with your prototyping. In the game above, I’ve added a game tuning panel made with Minimal Comps. To see it, right-click on the stage and choose “Show Testing Console.” This will open the panel with several options. The first button toggles the collision hitbox visibility. If you make the hitboxes visible, you will notice a bug that I left in the game when you move the character to the left. By changing the values in the textfields, you can adjust the game gravity and jump velocity until the gameplay works and feels right.  Minimal comps makes it easy to set up this testing panel for tuning your game in real time [...]

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