Some years ago I interviewed for a job as an artificial intelligence programmer working on the latest title in a well-known RPG franchise.  During my tour of the studio, the producer showed me the latest build of the game.  The engine was fairly far along and there was at least some content - a world with buildings, liberally populated with character models.  But lacking any AI, the characters simply stood around, unanimated, like so many statues.  It would have been my job to add the AI to drive animations on the models, and then game systems governing their interactions with the players.  In the end, I chose to go with a different company, mainly for real-life practical reasons.  But the image of those static characters, and the opportunity to breathe life into that frozen tableau, was very tempting.  It was difficult to turn down that job!  (They also had crab cakes in the cafeteria at lunch… very difficult to turn down that job.)

That particular road-not-taken was an example of what I’ll call “gameplay integration”.  Gameplay integration involves taking different pieces contributed from different areas of the team - art, design, and perhaps other engineers - and putting them together to create gameplay.  These programming tasks typically include a generous dose of artifical intelligence work, plus input processing/player control and often some user interface work.  It’s essentially where the end result, the player experience, is born.  For me, it is one of the most enjoyable aspects of game programming.  Our Thinglefin project has ample opportunity for this kind of work, and a recent task made me recognize two distinct pleasures that it can bring.

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With a new project comes learning a new programming language, Flash.  Or more specifically, the scripting language that drives the Flash runtime, ActionScript.  Before starting up with Thinglefin, I didn’t know the first thing about it, so the last few weeks have been quite the learning adventure.

After the break, this post will get down in the programming weeds, but of general interest may be my first ActionScript app.  While starting to learn a new language, I usually start with a simple Hello World program, then add little things to it to try out bits and pieces of the language.  Since this is Flash, though, my “Hello World” program is a bit, um, flashier.  You have to click a moving target to get it to say “Hello World.”  Try it out: Hello Flash!  (Credit: about 75% of the code in this program came from this online tutorial.) 

(You may need the latest version of Flash Player installed too: get it here.)

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This just happens to be another rambling post about programming. I’d like to get some kind of little tags by the post title so you can quickly tell what a post will be about, but until then, I will warn you manually.
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We’re using the Collada file format to get skeletal data and animations into the game, on the theory that it’d be simpler to use this exciting new open standard file format than it would be to write and support yet another damn Maya exporter. This theory might have been wrong, but at this point it’s working and there’s no going back. Read on for boring complaining:

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