The honeymoon abroad is over, the holidays have passed, and school is back in full swing. It feels good to be home.

Thailand was a wonderful adventure! I think I experienced about as much as a tall, pigment-challenged foreigner could thanks to my wife’s incredibly hospitable family. There were ups and downs, on account of my annoying fear of flying and a wonderful stomach bug halfway into the trip. It was my first international trip in 23 years and I must say that I look forward to many more. Perhaps we’ll look at Europe or New Zealand for our next excursion.

Since we’ve returned I’d heard that the 80 GB Playstation3 console had dropped to a acceptably expensive price, so now my home has a new BlueRay DVD player and 9-Core Cell processor gaming system. I have to admit, I’m quite impressed. Somehow, my wife and I were able to find the only remaining copy of Little Big Planet within 10 miles of our house, and since then I’ve had the pleasure of listening to her energetic squeeks of joy while controlling the game’s painfully adorable Sack Boys. More on that later.

Production on Conjurer is back in full swing. I’ll be wrapping up the enemy archer character soon, and should hopefully start in on the first level boss. We’re approaching a year anniversary since production began last February. That’s a lot longer than I thought it would take, but then again I’ve never designed a game with this level of production quality. I’ll admit I’ve learned a lot. Falling down and learning from your mistakes is the best way to be a better developer, and I can definitely assert that my next project after Conjurer will be much more streamlined.

Here’s to a new year chock full of new potential.

Coming up with level design for MageQuest is actually kind of hard. The worst part about starting something new is staring at a blank piece of paper or an empty photoshop file. It’s just like writers block. How should it start out? What should the backdrop be? How do I implement challenge and difficulty? Where should the enemies spawn?

Having a design document to start from is very efficient. As far as art is concerned, you know exactly what kind of setting the character is in and how the background art can portray it. You can think of clever ways that background objects can be used as platforms. Your design document tells you exactly what kind of enemies you have time to implement. Therefore you can design certain parts of your levels to accommodate their attack algorithms and exploit their strengths.

I’ve uploaded a rough sketch for level 1 where Erik the hero must fight through the Ogre General’s Horde that is sieging a small town. You can see a simple, segmented path that the hero should follow in order to reach the level boss. From this point, I can begin to lay out enemy spawn points and item drops. The ladders would probably be a great spot for Troll Archers to sit atop and snipe at Erik. The straight paths on the ground and rooftops make an excellent stage for melee fighters like the Goblin Soldiers and Orc Berserkers.

Through testing, I’ll be able to hone the difficulty of the level, but that’s much later on in development.

In Actionscript 3.0, in order for something to be loaded dynamically from your library and placed onto the stage, they must be added as a child of the stage. In MageQuest, my goal is to include the following game features:

• A tile-based scrolling background with two levels of parallax in the back, and one level of parallax in the front.
• background and foreground particles
• in-game GUI
• platforms for the game characters to jump on, climb, fall off, etc.

This presents a fair amount of complexity if you think about it. Especially when dealing with the issue of parallaxing background. How are my dynamically loaded library assets going to be thrown onto the stage in such a way that background elements are always behind the hero and enemies? How do I ensure that my particles always appear in front of the hero and enemies?

Simple really. I use separate Display Objects to hold certain elements, like map tiles and game characters, then stack them in a parent display object in a specific order to achieve the effect that I want. The image above is a diagram of how I’ve decided to lay out MageQuest’s display object hierarchy.

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Remember when I said that there weren’t that many flash game development blogs out there? I thought that the least I could do was assemble a list of as many I could find. Here goes:

Jobe Makar

8bitrocket

Interactive Crap

Andre Michelle

Patterson Consulting Inc.

Seb Lee-Delisle

Casual Game Development

I’ve composed a list of reference books for both programmers and artists. I own them all, so I can personally vouch for their usefulness. You can buy them through amazon now by clicking on them.