Kung Fu FIGHT!

Marvel at the glory of my pixel art skills!

This is the current version of the intro to Kung Fu FIGHT! - my upcoming game for Xbox Live Indie Games. The intro is still a bit rough around the edges, but at least I've got a first pass done.

Now, back to working on gameplay for a while...

Working on an Intro Cut Scene

I'm taking a break from game mechanics and have been doing some work on an intro to the game.

Also new since my last update are sprite drop-shadows and a textured paper effect. I may not stick with this exact texture, but I like the look.

Pixel Particle Decomposition and a New Enemy

Just I have models exploding in my 3D block engine, I now have 2D pixel decomposition in my pixel engine. I'm not sure if I'll keep the enemies exploding this way when they die, but it looks cool.

The new enemy is a polearm dude that you need to hit high or low depending on the posture he takes.

Pixel Engine

My foray into Flash development has come to an end - at least for the moment. I love the easy deployment of Flash games, and I was reasonably happy with the dev environment, but not being able to get a solid framerate was a deal-breaker for me.

I really liked the simplicity of working with simple 2D pixel graphics, though, so I spent last week putting together a little pixel graphics engine on top of XNA. I borrowed some of the ideas I liked from FlashPunk, combined them with bits from my 3D engine, and soon had something pretty workable on my hands.

The cool thing is that I've kept all of the XNA dependencies very isolated, so it should be easy to port to another .NET-based platform (MonoDroid and MonoTouch come to mind).

As you can see in the above video, I've got my little Kung Fu game ported over to the new platform. After my flash experience, it was great to see it running nice and smooth (although you can't tell that from the video - I still haven't figured out how to get smooth video on youtube...)

I Made a Flash Game

The little game above is something I came up with while spending a few days learning Flash. ActionScript turns out to not be as bad as I thought it would be, and FlashDevelop is a pretty nice working environment. I'm also using the FlashPunk game library.

To play:

• Up Arrow to jump
• Down Arrow to duck/slide
• X to punch/kick

If you run into a shuriken, table, or enemy (without attacking first) you die. Note that you can slide under tables and you can kick in the air.

My reflexes aren't what they used to be - my current record is 73 seconds.

The framerate stutters here and there. I haven't been able to figure out why - I think it might just be impossible to get a rock-steady framerate with Flash, which kind of sucks.