Jumbler, my first flash game

Over the weekend I published my first flash game, it’s called Jumbler. There is not too much to the game, to be honest. It was really more the result of me tinkering with the Flixel game framework to see what it could do; rather then my idea of a “blow your mind, addictive game”.

I’m must say that I’m pretty impressed with Flixel. Jumbler took less then 10 hours to put together and the bulk of the time was spent on the theme and graphics (such as they are). The initial game code (with box only graphics) took only about 3 hours.

The other cool thing was that this was built with entirely free tools and assets:

Flixel – is a really great AS3 game framework. It does a fantastic job of turning flash into a game engine and letting you focus on writing a game, not on fighting with Flash.
Flex SDK – The flash compiler and tools given away by Adobe.
Flashdevelop – An open source Flash IDE. Syntax completion is a dream.
Inkscape – An open source vector editor kinda of like Illustrator. It uses SVG as its native format and has excellent .png export support. All the graphics in Jumbler are drawn with Inkscape which made it really easy to resize, edit and evolve them on the fly.
Flash Kit – Excellent resource for free sound effects.
dafont.com – Excellent resource for free fonts. This is where I found the Boingo font that I used to drive the look of jumbler.

If you are interested in getting started with Flixel, then check out these links. The first is a basic “Hello World” tutorial, which shows you how to get your environment set-up and write a simple Flixel app. The second shows you all the key concepts you need to understand to build a game in Flixel, by creating a simple Defender style game.

I’m thinking of porting my half-finished “nac” game over to Flixel and integrating Box2D for the physics. It should be interesting.