Ben Silvis

In this post I would like to introduce you to a custom class I wrote for working with sprite sheets. Now “what’s a sprite sheet?” you might ask. Well, while I’m not going to delve into much of the theory or the speed benefits from using them, you should know a few things:

A sprite sheet is a collection of sprites arranged into a single image, where each sprite represents a frame of an animation, an asset, a part of an image, or something to that extent. The idea of a sprite sheet has been utilized for a long time, namely in early gaming systems like Atari and Nintendo. In recent times they are most often used for efficient bitmap animation and are extremely useful in tile based games for level creation.

When loading external assets, many times you will find that it is much more time and code efficient to load many in one state – Not to mention that when used effectively this can save memory. Also, once you start animating many objects in a scene you will see a real performance spike when compared to regular Flash keyframe animation. Props to 8bitrocket for some useful info.

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Once you really get going into designing basically any kind of computer game – whether it be a 2-D platformer like Contra or even online video Poker – you are eventually going to need some kind of keyboard control besides general typing. Traditionally this could be the arrow keys or W,A,S,D for movement, spacebar for jumping or plasma-ray firing, R for retry or Q for quit, but really the level of control is up to you.

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So I’m sitting here, having recently misplaced my glasses, and it’s become quite apparent to me that I can’t see. Somehow in the midst of the unfortunate circumstances I find the inspiration for my first tutorial:

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This is mainly just a test to see how well Flash works with my blog. So far it looks like there won’t be any problems.

I have a LOT of silly little experiments collecting dust in the annexes of my many hard drives, so I thought I’d share one while I am tinkering -

Here’s the start of space shooter game I’d like to overhaul someday. It’s one of the first pseudo-real games I made. Theres a pretty long story behind it, but I won’t get into any of that right now..
It still has a working title, but for now I call it:

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BenSilvis.com is a blog now!

In the past this website has been a random collection of projects I’ve either spearheaded or been a part of. I now plan to present at least a semi-professional portfolio and attempt to give a little know-how back to the web community.

Oh yeah I guess I forgot to say that I’m a Flash Developer currently spreading my wings. I’m obsessed with game design and I have ties in 3D, game engines, web design, yada yada.. I’m not too savvy with the whole blogging thing, but this seems like a great place to host  new projects, ideas, tutorials, and other things that tickle my fancy.

Well.. I’ll flesh this things out over the next little while. Enjoy!