Well, so much for that plan. I completely fell off the wagon and abandoned my blog a couple days after I promised more content. However, the good news is that nobody reads my blog anyway, so I didn't disappoint anybody.
Now, for another empty promise nobody will ever read: from now on, I will try to remember to write a post on my blog every other day and write two tweets a day. You can find my Twitter feed here, just in case you're a spam bot looking for a random Twitter feed to follow.
I'm finally "done" with my AS3 game engine now. It doesn't play music, support sound effects, or use character animation at all (okay, maybe a little), but it doesn't try to. I'll give you an example of how it would work.
First, you'd have to download the file. Then, you alter the levels.xml file with to point to the levels' background images and ground profiles. You add the enemies with the <enemy /> tag, the player controlled character with the <fighter /> tag, and the goal with the <goal /> tag. You can alter the position of the fighter, the goal, and the enemies and change the background image and layout of the level without even recompiling the code.
To add a character, you do have to start up flash, but you don't have to do any real coding. Simply make a class for your character in the com.flashgames.bunnyhopper file, set the max speed, jump height, and acceleration through simple variables, and associate the class with a library object. Now, you can add your character to the level by simply altering the levels.xml file.
It's not the most sophisticated game engine, or the most open-ended, but anybody (with flash) can easily reshape the game with a little HTML understanding and little-to-no programming knowledge. Let's see you do that with APE or Box2D!
I apologize to anybody who has attempted to follow this blog. I have been very indifferent toward blog writing for the last couple of weeks, so there hasn't been any new content for quite some time.
However, I have now set myself some arbitrary goals for blog writing and twittering. I will try to remember to write at least one blog post every other day and two tweets per day. I want to rely on more than just the Kirupa forum to establish my reputation.
And now, the excuse. Unfortunately, I'm about to travel to Louisiana to visit my family over Christmas, so I'll be unlikely to hit my goal over for about two weeks. I'll still try, but I can't make any promises.
Tomorrow, I'll be writing about my XML-backed AS3 game engine. You may or may not want to miss it, depending on whether you're interested in that sort of thing. It's your choice.