Gathering Storm - The First Day

November 30, 2011

All right, so I had been inspired by Dinosaur Comics, downloaded a trial version of Flash Professional and was ready to make a freakin' game already. I knew it would be hard and I had zero experience, so I started small.

I knew I wanted to make a first person dungeon crawler, which, at it's core, is making a first-person perspective move around in a grid of walls and, umm, not walls. So the first thing I wanted to do was see if I could make a simple box move around in a 3x3 grid using the arrow keys. Not knowing a single flash command, I felt this was a humble enough goal.

And it was. After a day working on it on and off, looking up tutorials and bits of code on the Internet, I managed to technically fulfill my goal. Behold!
True to beginner fashion, I programmed this thing like a complete idiot. I animated every possible movement (24 in total) and then just sent the program to the proper frames of a 240-frame-long file depending on where the box was and what directional key was pressed. Pretty ridiculous, but it worked. I'm just glad I didn't decide on a 5x5 grid.

It was almost like a wax-on, wax-off sort of thing. I did something pointless and needlessly tedious, but that's kind of what you have to do to start learning functions and commands of a new code. I strengthened some basic animation muscles and got some chops in adding and removing event listeners.

Next up: Day two! (So exciting!)

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