Exploring Flixel

March 7th, 2011 § 4 comments

exploring flixel
Flixel is a free, open source 2D game engine built in ActionScript 3, from Adam Atomic, creator of Canabalt and other games. I became especially curious about Flixel ever since the iOS version of Canabalt went open source at the end of 2010. Both the Flash and iOS versions of Canabalt use Flixel. I understand that the iOS port of Flixel is still early, and from what I can tell, documentation for the iOS port is essentially nonexistent as of yet.

Regardless, here is my plan:

  1. Learn Flixel and create a game
  2. Port it to iOS [EDIT: that is, port my game to iOS, using the Flixel iOS port that is in the Canabalt source]
  3. ???
  4. PROFIT!!!

…all while blogging about the experience, of course. At least, that’s the idea — no promises that I’ll actually get very far! If I get really ambitious I might even write a tutorial at some point.

First experiences

Getting started with Flixel was pretty easy, thanks to the “Hello, World” tutorials available on the Flash Game Dojo wiki (which appears to be the main documentation hub for Flixel). After that I wasn’t sure where to go next, since the documentation is a bit scattered and disorganized. I did find some great info on the Github project page and wiki, which oddly is not linked to from the Flixel home page (as I said, a bit scattered). Perhaps Flash Game Dojo is where all the action is supposed to be now? I’m not really sure.

What I’m finding most helpful right now are the very simple example games, complete with source code, provided by Adam Atomic, which are a great help to see how the framework expects things to be set up. The FlxTeroids source code is instructive, as well as EZPlatformer (which has a nice tutorial with it).

Despite the disorganization, there is a lot of good information out there, including the very active forums (which I’ve not yet explored).

A question of units

One bit of info I couldn’t find was what units the FlxObject class uses for velocity and acceleration. I did a quick experiment, and it turns out that velocity is in pixels per second, and acceleration is in pixels per second per second — all very sensible, but it wasn’t explicitly stated anywhere I could find. Similarly, the angle and angularVelocity members are in degrees (not radians) and degrees per second.

What’s next?

This has been a bit of a rambling blog post (I, too, am a bit scattered!). Next I decide on what kind of game to make (something very simple) and start making it! Along the way I will share what I’ve learned.

Stay tuned…!

§ 4 Responses to Exploring Flixel"

  • chris says:

    Check out the 6 hour tutorial (in ten minute sections) by perfectlittlepixels on youtube.

  • bunnyhero says:

    Cool, thanks for the tip!

  • Could you plz check out my tutorials maybe they are helpfull @ my site.

    But i got a question.
    Why are you porting it to iOS ?? There is a version for it it’s in the cannabalt source.
    You will re invent the wheel unless it is for your personal iOS learning.

  • bunnyhero says:

    Perhaps my blog post wasn’t clear! I’m not porting Flixel to iOS. I plan to port MY GAME to iOS, using the Flixel iOS port in the Canabalt source code.

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