Ecce Sigum

Tag: Flash

  • Langton’s Ant with Heat Map

    Langton's Ant Heat Map

    Click here to see it in action.

    This is an update to the previous Langton’s Ant experiment. For this one I have added a heat map which shows the frequency with which the “ant” visits each cell in this grid. The more visits to a cell, the “hotter” the color. Click the application to toggle between the ant view and the heat map view.

    I am really enjoying playing around with this thing. I have “hex” and “oct” variations (the above is a “quad”) waiting in the wings, and am exploring what it will take to make a 3d version, which hopefully I will have done this weekend.

  • Langton’s Ant, Reboot

    Langton's Ant

    Click here to run the ants.

    Another Cellular Automaton experiment. The rules for this one work as follows:
    0. Place an ant on a grid.
    1. check the color of the square the ant is on.
    2a. If the square is red, turn it black and turn to the left.
    2b. If the square is black, turn it red and turn to the right.
    3. Move forward one square and repeat.

    No interaction here; it will do the same thing every time you visit.

    If you are patient, some interesting things begin to happen around iteration 10,000.

  • Automata I

    Cellular Automaton

    Click here to run the automata.

    Once upon a time I did something like this, maybe back in 2003 or 2004. I recently re-arranged my bookshelves and discovered my copy of A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. So now I have caught the CA bug.

    Click the application to reset it. More interaction will be coming soon.

  • Weekly Gyruss Update

    Gyruss-like Flash game

    The weekly Gyruss update. Click here to play around.

    Another update – this one focusing more on graphics. I really think the rotating background adds something, but to make it look good I had to mask it to a circle in the center, and that seems to ask for a groovy border of some kind. Yeah, definitely a groovy border.

  • New Gyruss Update

    Gyruss clone in Flash Actionscript 3

    An update concentrating on some gameplay mechanics, mostly optimizing for speed and playing around with the effects of power-ups; specifically, allowing the player to fire multiple shots. Arrow keys move left and right, space bar shoots. Click the image to launch the game.

  • All Alike

    Procedurally generated maze in Actionscript 3

    Click here to launch the maze explorer.

    I have combined two of my experiments into something greater than the sum of the parts. Or at least, pretty close to equal to the sum of the parts. The height map explorer from a couple of weeks ago, combined with the maze from a few days ago. The combining took me all of ten minutes.

    Now that I have got this far, I next need to start playing with collision detection so players can navigate the mazes, instead of flying over them.

    A more technical description of this experiment can be found on my GameDev blog

  • aMazeIng!

    A generated maze. Click the image to play.

     

    Sorry for the title; I couldn’t help myself.

    I took the Java code from the Wikipedia article on Maze Generation Algorithms, converted it to Actionscript, and Voila! A randomly generated maze of practically infinite variations. For all intents and purposes it is just an image at the moment, but I will soon add wall detection and turn it into a game of some kind. Click anywhere on the maze to generate a new one.

  • Some Improvements

    Gyruss Clone in Flash and Actionscipt 3

    An update to the game. Click the screenshot to see it in action.

    Still very rough, but playable for the moment. Arrow keys to move clockwise/widdershins, and SPACE to fire.

  • The Gyruss Clone Revisited

    Click the image to see the experiment in action.

     

    Arrow keys to move clockwise/widdershins. Click the movie if nothing happens at first.

    My tile game experiments led me back to an old project where I was trying to recreate/reinvent the game Gyruss in Flash. I was playing around with the Perlin Noise generation functionality in Flash, and co-incidentally came across a polar distortion class at BIT-101. I took it, played with it a bit, and figured out how to go from Polar Distortion to Twirl, with the addition of one very short line of code. Voila! I had the thing you see above. The addition of a simple gradient provides the depth.

  • Tile Game Engine, part III – Color Substitution

    Perlin Noise Game Tile Engine in Actionscript 3

    An update to the game, this time with color substitution. Click the screenshot to play around

    Use the arrow keys to move around. Hit the reset button to swap out the background.