Haxe + OpenFL Game \ Level Development.

[The.Th!ng]

Hi there, Devs.

First of all I want to say your game looks great and I think you've captured that 70's cop show look n feel perfectly.

I'd never heard of either Haxe or OpenFL until I saw them mentioned here in a few posts so I've been doing a bit of research and I'm interested in trying my hand at development, but it's still not really clear to me what is going on here - is "The Masterplan" a collection of flash files and associated assets inside a Windows *.exe wrapper?

The OpenFL wiki says:

OpenFL is a free and open source software framework and platform for the creation of multi-platform applications and video games. OpenFL programs are written in a single language (Haxe) and may be published to Flash movies, or standalone applications for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Firefox OS, HTML5 and Tizen.

From reading the above it appears that there is a bit more to it than just an *exe wrapper.

I had a look at some of the language features of Haxe and I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this example var evenNumbers = [ for (i in 0...100) if (i%2==0) i ]; - I'd never seen that done in any other language.

I'd be grateful if one of the developers could offer some insight into the development process.

Thanks for reading.

[Leksapeksa]

Hello!

I'll try answer some basic things about Haxe + OpenFL and then point you to some other resources where you can learn more.

Автор сообщения: haxe.org

Haxe is an open source toolkit based on a modern high level strictly typed programming language, a state-of-the-art light-speed cross-compiler, a complete cross-platform standard library, and ways to access to each platform's native capabilities.

This captures what Haxe is quite well. And it it's quite a lot of things. You write Haxe, the language, using the standard the Haxe library, you compile that with Haxe, the compiler, and maybe use some platform specific stuff in the process.

In our case we write Haxe with some bits of inline C/C++ and compile that using the Haxe compiler to C++ and then use gcc, Xcode or Visual Studio depending on platform to produce the actual The Masterplan.exe (The Masterplan.app on Mac etc.).

Haxe, the language, is quite nice to write. Especially if you are coming from a Flash (ActionScript) or JavaScript background you should be almost right at home. Java and C# are not far of either. (I can also say say that we write very simple Haxe code and we don't have a single line in our codebase that looks like your the for loop in your example.)

Haxe standard library doesn't really provide anything to create window, draw graphics or play sounds. For that we use OpenFL. OpenFL provides a Flash API like API to draw, play sounds etc. In addition OpenFL also provides a more direct way access to stuff like OpenGL to draw and OpenAL to play sounds. This is what we use for The Masterplan.

We chose Haxe and OpenFL almost two years ago because we had a quite heavy JavaScript background and these technologies seemed like a good way to write cross platform games using a language and technology stack that's pretty close to what we already knew.

See http://www.openfl.org/learn/ to learn more about OpenFL or start directly with something like HaxeFlixel[haxeflixel.com]. Also http://try.haxe.org/ is pretty sweet for testing.

[The.Th!ng]

Thanks for your reply, Leksapeksa.

This captures what Haxe is quite well. And it it's quite a lot of things. You write Haxe, the language, using the standard the Haxe library, you compile that with Haxe, the compiler, and maybe use some platform specific stuff in the process. 

The above was quite informative as it wasn't clear to me what exactly Haxe was beforehand.

I have both Haxe and OpenFL installed and I'm just getting the hang of things by following a few tutorials. I really like the FlashDevelop ide too, nice and lightweight, no bloat.

What software did you use to create the graphics for the game?

[MekaSkull]

Assets drawn in photoshop and animated in After Effects or Spriter.

[The.Th!ng]

Thanks for letting me know.