Swingpant's Game Lab

My ‘build a game in three minutes’ session at this year’s excellent Flash on the Beach somehow morphed into building three games in three minutes.

My initial thinking was to code on the fly and put together something simple – I wanted physics and the ability to render a 3D version. It only took a couple of experiments to realise that trying to write AND compile in a strict 3 minutes would be near impossible. I needed some assets and wanted to produce these in the allotted time too.

While cogitating the pitch, I had a lot of game commissions and ideas come through my desk. I clicked that a Game Scratchpad would be a really handy app. Something that I could sketch out a game with – to demonstrate an idea during a brainstorm – at the speed of thought.

More on the Game Sketchpad in Part#2. See the last two minutes of the pitch here (not sure what happened to the first minute):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLiKTdB89AA

In the meantime, I got asked by quite a few about the transition effect I used on my slides. To save time I did all of my presentation from within a swf. I wanted a fun quirky transition. The Genie (Ginny) effect is newish – I’d spotted it on wonderfl.net by Clockmaker (inspired by Fladdict). So I grabbed the method and adapted it to allow me to fire it off from a given point – connecting relevant sprites (humorous and tasteless in good measure).

I have packaged the Genie effect here as a Class, with example implementation.

//Usage
import com.swingpants.effect.GenieBmd
var gb:GenieBmd=new GenieBmd(400,300,20)// image width, height, number of segments
gb.startGenie(bmd) // Bitmapdata
gb.fireAtPoint(50,100,3) //x, y, speed (in secs)

Swingpant's AS3 Genie Effect implementation

In part#2 I will explain how the Game Sketchpad works, the component parts, the swf and some source code.

Genie Effect (zip): source
Presentation (Youtube): video