Enter the Stick Figure

So after about 24 hours (including some three hours of sleep and a few hours worth of errands and a few more of distractions), I've had roughly five to eight hours of playing with Flixel. After getting everything installed and set up, I worked through the Hello World tutorial on the Flixel website, which goes over the important steps of setting up a project and getting something on screen. I couldn't really find any other tutorials in the immediate area, so I started digging through the documentation manually, which wasn't exactly helpful to someone new to all this.

I then stumbled upon a few games made in Flixel with available source code, including clones of Space Invaders and Asteroids, and also a collision demo and a game mentioned in the Hello World tutorial as the Flixel test bed (which uses most if not all of the features available). Thus armed, I browsed through the code, finding and fixing a bug (in which a comment suggested a feature, but it hadn't been fully implemented). Just going through FlxInvaders was enough to get me started on my own adventures with getting a sprite on screen.

This is Matches the Stick Figure, a character from my first game at DigiPen. A few years ago, he saved the notebook from General Disarray and his evil minions, but has been enjoying some time off playing ultimate, occasionally gracing other programs of mine as a guest cameo. However, Matches is not content to stand in one place for very long at a time, so I've got some simple movement off to the right.

Splendid! Matches was always a bit of a pacer though, so I also gave him the ability to move left (complete with horizontal flipping).


Finally, Matches needs some ups if he's ever going to catch a high-thrown disc.


As much as I enjoy bringing Matches back into the limelight, it wasn't all fun and games. I had a few problems getting the initial sprite to show up, most of which were silly (i.e. black sprite on a black background, not having an animation speed, etc.). Originally, Matches was in the top-left corner of the screen, and when I tried to move him to the horizontal center, I managed to move him off of the right side (I'm still not quite sure how all of that is working, but it seems to be at a 2x zoom). There was also a bit of confusion when looking through the documentation for horizontal flipping, and a few oddities when I added jumping.

Overall, nothing went majorly wrong. It was a learning experience, and I was doomed to make some of those mistakes due to being new at Flash and Flixel at the same time. It does remind me a lot of C#, especially using Flash Develop, which is much like Visual Studio. There's a lovely working intellisense that kicks in once you have two or three letters to go off of.

While I haven't had much time to actually try anything, Myna does look pretty cool and easy to use (once you get the hang of it of course). However, I did play around with Acunote today, setting up my to-do list as a project. It's quite nice, though I would like for it to have the play/pause capabilities of Voo2Do. While Voo2Do is better for short to-do lists and keeping track of and prioritizing school-work, Acunote could definitely be awesome for a team-based project.

My favorite feature thus far is the prediction, which estimates when you'll finish all the project's tasks based on your rate of work thus far. It does this both individually and as a team, so you can see who works slower and faster. This can all be used to shuffle workloads around as needed. There's also a neat graph of how many hours of work there are left to do. I'm really looking forward to trying out the repository link-up, too.

All in all, it's been a busy and productive day. Now for some much deserved rest!