Interactive Prototype 1 - Progress

I had commenced development of the first Interactive Prototype in Flash a week ago. Back then, I was able to spawn the player and aliens and make them move. However, the player would move in a very primitive manner - i.e. the  movement was very choppy and linear.

The player and aliens can be spawned and they can also move.

The sprites in the game are exactly the ones used in my Video Prototype, they've just been imported from the Illustrator file. This not only saves my time, but it also makes everything consistent. What my Video Prototype showcased was intended to be exactly what the game should look like (as much as possible, of course), and therefore that is what I am aiming to accomplish.

As of today, the majority of the game is complete. The player is able to move smoothly with acceleration as well as shoot bullets. The aliens can drop letter-bombs which are able to land on the ground and turn red or green depending on whether they are a part of the secret word the player has to guess.

As you can see, much more has been implemented.

Currently, the aliens cannot be killed because the entire row is a single entity. Also, the player cannot be killed by the letter-bombs. I have done this purposely because I want to know people's opinions on whether or not the aliens should be killable and the player should be invincible. This will be done during the testing next week.

The game is over when the row of aliens get too close to the player, so it is actually possible to lose the game. However, right now it's impossible to win because I haven't implemented the player's answer which should be at the bottom of the screen to populate with the correctly fallen letters. In the Video Prototype, I had shown an array of boxes at the bottom of the screen which would contain the correctly fallen letters. For now, I will just implement a single text field which updates itself as the correct letters fall.

Some additional miscellaneous functionality I have implemented are the splash screen and game over screen. For now, they are just basic images created in Illustrator and imported into the Flash project.

Personally, coding in ActionScript 3 isn't very difficult as I have learnt Java previously and the syntax is almost exactly the same. I am also used to the concept of OOP. Using Flash overall hasn't been hard to grasp because I've worked with Flash a few years ago (back in the Macromedia days, but I've also used the CS3 version). It just took a little time to adjust to the interface changes because I haven't used Flash since then.

For next week's testing, I just need to implement the answer text field at the bottom of the screen and that will be sufficient for my testing purposes.