Book Image

Box2D for Flash Games

Book Image

Box2D for Flash Games

Overview of this book

Physics games are getting more and more popular, and Box2D is the best choice if you are looking for a free, stable and robust library to handle physics. With Box2D you can create every kind of 2D physics game, only coding is not the fun part, but the game itself. "Box2D for Flash Games" will guide you through the process of making a Flash physics game starting from the bare bones and taking you by hand through complex features such as forces, joints and motors. As you are learning, your game will have more and more features, like the physics games you are used to playing. The book analyzes two of the most played physics games, and breaks them down to allow readers to build them from scratch in a step-by-step approach. By the end of the book, you will learn how to create basic primitive bodies as well as complex, compound bodies. Motors will give life to cars, catapults and siege machines firing bullets, while a complete collision management will make your game look even more realistic. If you want to make full Flash games with physics, then Box2D for Flash Games will guide you through the entire process of making a Flash physics game.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Box2D for Flash Games
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a Totem Destroyer level


Now you have the skills to create your first game prototype, and we are going to start with a Totem Destroyer level.

To show you we are doing things for real, we will take a real level of the popular Flash game Totem Destroyer, and reproduce an exactly similar one. Look at the following screenshot:

Totem Destroyer: Gabriel Ochsenhofer (www.gabs.tv)

This is the first level of the original Totem Destroyer game, and if you look at it you will find bricks of a size which are multiples of 30. Can you figure out why? Yes, it's simple, because of the meters to pixels conversion.

The author probably created the game working directly with meters, but we are sticking to our guns and working with pixels.

At the moment we don't need to worry about brown and black pixels, we just want to reproduce the totem.

Before we start coding, for the sake of simplicity, I would suggest you create a couple of functions that will help us to reuse the code. Don't worry, there's nothing new...