Creating the Color Drop Casual Puzzle Game - The Essential Guide to Flash Games

Game Development Reference

In-Depth Information

Initializing the game

The init function is called from the Game constructor to set up the initial variable values for Color

Drop. We start by setting the value for tileSheet . As we discussed in the section about the Block

class, we need to pass the tileSheet to Block instances when they are created. The parameters

for TileSheet are the bitmap we are using for the tiles as set in the SWF library (in this case,

ColorSheet ) and the height and width of the tiles we are going to cut from the tile sheet. The Flex

version of this code has been commented out but left in so you can see the differences.

public function init():void {

//***** Flash IDE *****

tileSheet = new TileSheet(new ColorSheet(0,0), BLOCK_WIDTH,BLOCK_HEIGHT);

//***** End Flash IDE *****

//***** Flex *****

//tileSheet = new TileSheet(new ColorSheet().bitmapData, BLOCK_WIDTH,

BLOCK_HEIGHT); //***** End Flex *****

Now, we need to create the difficulty levels for the game. To do this, we first initialize our

difficultyLevelArray array. Then, we simply create each level one at a time by pushing a new

instance of DifficultyLevel into the array.

Since the object of the game Color Drop is to remove adjacent same-color blocks from the screen,

the difficulty ramps by adding more colors that will appear per level. We do this by passing an array

of Block.BLOCK_COLOR_XXX values as the first parameter for DifficultyLevel . The other parameters

are startPlays , the number of plays added for the player when the level starts; and

scoreThreshold , the score that must be reached on that level to advance to the next. We have left

both of these values the same for every level. This would be the first place to tinker with this game,

changing values to see if the difficulty for this game can be managed in a different way.

difficultyLevelArray = new Array();