ASTP 2.0 Technical Demo

2010-06-13T17:12:00.003-06:00

When i finished work on Spaceman Deke back in 2008, it was pretty obvious that the point and click adventure game engine i'd written for it wasn't going to be suitable for making any other games. And since making more games is what i really wanted to do, i set about writing a new game engine from the ground up. I called it "ASTP 2.0," mostly because i'd called the original "Adventure Systems Tool by Phredt." And i really only called it that because Spaceman Deke was named after the docking module pilot in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

Unfortunately, after several months making some good progress on ASTP 2.0, i became distracted by XNA; Microsoft's shiny game development suite. The appeal in XNA is that it allows the development of games for the Xbox 360 which other people could potentially pay a couple of dollars to download. With giant dollar signs in my eyes, i wrestled with XNA for the better part of a year. Ultimately i realized that development using Flash had gone about a million times quicker than it was with XNA. In fact, XNA is the single most frustrating programming language i have ever worked with.

To celebrate my separation from XNA and reuniting with Flash, i'm posting this: the ASTP 2.0 technical demo. It's not a game by itself; all it really does is showcase some of the neat things the new engine does so far. I'm particularly proud of the dynamic lip-sync function, which completely automates the animation of the characters' mouths to match what they're saying. Everywhere i'd looked told me that that was impossible to do with Flash, but i made it happen anyway. And i did it using Flash MX (Flash 6), which came out in 2002.

This demo doesn't showcase quite everything that i've coded so far, but if you compare it to Spaceman Deke, you can still definitely see improvements.

Spaceman Deke

2010-06-13T17:10:00.003-06:00

--What is Spaceman Deke?--

Spaceman Deke is a point-and-click graphical adventure game similar to Day of the Tentacle, The Neverhood and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. It's about and alien named Deke who crashes his flying saucer on Earth and has to repair it.

It's also a small scale test for me to see exactly what's involved in making such a game in flash, which is why it's a bit on the under-polished side. Turns out that it's a lot of work, especially when you're just one person and you're not a very skilled programmer. The idea is that using what i've learned from this game, i can make bigger, better games.

For information on these future games as they are up and coming, just give me a watch. I update my journal pretty regularly with developer blog type stuff.

--How to Play--

After the extremely well animated opening cut scene plays, just point and click wherever you want Deke to walk, or click on any people or things that might seem interesting. The idea is to retrieve the three parts of your ship that you're missing so you can leave this backwater little planet.

imbrium base

ASTP 2.0 Technical Demo

Spaceman Deke