Game 1: Breakout

My first game is done! Some personal stuff got in the way of work but I managed to get something finished-ish out. Putting the final touches on a game takes longer than I was expecting. I was planning on adding some music and power-ups and silly effects but ended up running out of time.

I started trying to make something in GameMaker Studio. I liked the very visual programming style and how intuitive it all felt. The in-built tutorials in particular are extremely well-made, I would definitely recommend this to anyone who wants to start making games without any programming experience. I found it difficult to do complex things as a lot of things were being done automatically and, after looking at some workarounds, decided to try something else.

This game was made in ActionScript 3 using the Flex library. Actionscript is a dynamically-typed language but I used it in strict mode, which seems to be about half way between dynamic and static typing. It was interesting learning the new syntax and the graphical manipulation was a lot easier than swing. Because I was unfamiliar with the language and library, it made debugging very difficult. I struggled with importing different types of files in Java but it was a bit less painful in Flex.

Next week I plan to go back to Java and will hopefully not make a clone of a 40-year-old game : )