The Chosen Approach

As I mentioned in previous sections, I originally was planning to use the artistic approach to the creation of the rooms. In fact, I had originally envisioned a on-screen character that would move around. Creating and animating a character, on top of all the artwork for the rooms, would have simply taken way too long so I decided I would go with a strictly 3D point of view for the episode.

Knowing I didn’t have time to do the artwork the way I originally planned, I figured that I could cheat by using different colors for the rooms. Knowing about the tinting option that Flash has for objects, I figured I would try tinting the rooms to see how well the technique worked. While the tinting was not as good as I liked, it was good enough. In fact, the tinting to create multiple versions of a same object technique is one that can be used elsewhere (especially if the file size is a major factor) and one that I used for other games in the first volume.

I decided that I absolutely needed some type of transition, and since I could not have the player running through the door I would have some other effect. This is too bad, as if I had the character in the game, the non-linear nature of the world could have been made a bit more clear by having the player walk through one door, the room change to the new one, and then have the character appear by walking through a different door than the player would expect. Instead the transition would be a zooming out and zooming in of the rooms. This is a very simple animation to do, but makes the code for handling the doors a bit more difficult to handle. Without the transition animation you could simply have a gotoAndPlay statement attached to the button events. Instead, the target room is stored in a variable. When the transition animation is complete, a global function is called. This function looks up the variable that was set and goes to the appropriate room.

If you have need in your games to have a non-linear maze, any of the techniques mentioned in this chapter could be your solution. The pure programming approach will work as long as the differences between rooms can be implemented algorithmically, while the artistic approach gives you the most artistic freedom at the cost of the most artist time. Just try and make sure that you really do need a non-linear maze in your game. Linear mazes, will be covered in future chapters as some of the episodes do place the player in a three-dimensional maze.