Case 1 - The First Steps

After some thinking I decided to make a platform game based on computer viruses and antivirus software. The actions in the game will be located inside a computer that is infested with all sorts of viruses, bugs, Trojan horses etc.

The hero of the game and the one you’ll be controlling will be Nortrom MacFree (also the title of the game), the antivirus-man. He’s going to be a geeky looking guy with a powerful armor, and his quest will be to find and destroy the “Mother virus”, or some kind of boss/nemesis. To be able to destroy this enemy, he has to fight his way through the computer, killing viruses and gathering microchips that he will use to defeat his nemesis.

Nortrom will go through the computer, and if doesn’t get killed by viruses or falls into fans etc. he will face his nemesis in an epic battle. This part of the game I’m probably just going to animate, due to my lack of programming skills. The game will be built up like a “standard” platform game, for instance Super Mario, where the “camera” follows the character to the right, as he moves from platform to platform without falling to his doom or getting whopped by enemies.

When I was designing my hero, I tried to make him as “simple” as possible. By that I mean that I tried to keep the numbers of vector points low. If a character has too many vector points, the danger of lagging in the game increases. It’s also a lot easier animating characters with a smaller amount of vector points. Therefore I used the shapes tool in Flash a lot, and then modifying these geometric shapes with the selection and sub-selection tool, dragging and forming the shapes as desired.

Here’s the finished hero of my game. The version that is shown from the side is the one that you’ll be able to control in-game. The other one is just going to be used in an eventual intro/outro.








Another thing I did to make the size of the flash file smaller, and the animation process more efficient, was to make each body part into a symbol. A symbol is a reusable object used in Flash. A symbol can be reused throughout your movie or imported and used in other movies. The advantage of using symbols is that the size of the symbol is only “taken into consideration” once even if you use it fifty times in a flash file.

I also distributed all the symbols into individual layers, so that I easily can lock the layers (containing body parts) I don’t want to edit, and be free to do what I want on the unlocked layer without worrying about messing up the other layers. Layers are in theory the same as transparent sheets of paper arranged on top of each other. Then each layer can be edited, drawn on and erased without affecting the other layers.