Wednesday, April 8, 2009

UPC Racing Game



Just a quick post today.

We've just finished working on a racing game in flash for UPC, a big Cable internet company in Holland.

Technically the game is a nice mix of optimization and user (designer) friendliness.

My Collegue Martin Strieder was responsible for all the artwork, and I did the all the programming.

It's Actionscript 2 code (Due to time restrictions and my relative noob-ness in As3)

The game prerenders all frames to bitmaps for the scenery at runtime during the 'loader' you see after clicking "start". So the artwork in the FLA file are just vectors, no bitmaps, and are easy to modify in the timeline. (which is good for re-use of gfx building blocks)
This gave us a BIG performance boost during the game.

The opponents have a simple AI to keep the speed up and only do basic avoidance of eachother and the player (if they're behind you)

Since this is a pretty cpu intensive game, I've also added a framerate watcher, which will turn down the renderquality of flash a notch when it detects a low framerate.

On my develop and testcomputer (which is a lot slower) this meant that I could keep playing the game at 30 fps.

Click here to play the game

Let me know what you think :)