Eggy's Games

This was my last ever Flash game and oh boy was it huge. It had 14 different buildings, 40 different enemies and 40 different items. The game was a base building game with real time mixed with an RPG game with fully fleshed out skill trees. Arcalona was my massive legacy of Flash to leave behind.

The Game Itself

The game is a base building game mixed with an RPG game. It all came together great in the end. You can build your usual buildings to increase lumber, food and gold as usual in a usual building sequence. You could place the buildings where you wanted. While you do this you drop back and forth into the RPG element of vsing ever increasing enemies. The game came out so well and was exactly what I wanted. It was my last Flash game, my biggest and my most proud.

The game ends up being over 1000+ lines of code on the main timeline itself. It was massive and debugging was a nightmare without a class system. Everything was basically on one keyframe. It's the first time when coding I have had to compress entire sections to be able to find sections. It had extensive comments to remember where it all was. The game toed the line of crashing the program all the time, it really was at the very limit of what Flash could take. I pushed it to the limit and succeeded.

Production

The game took a long time, I was working other jobs at the time so the time it took to finish this game was about 12 months. I also had a long break from Flash before coming back to this. So I was a bit rusty and things took a little longer to remember. Since I had been on hiatus for a while, the goal was to make this huge game and then move onto using Unity. I just didn't realise how big of an uptaking this was at the time.

These days in Unity things can be produced much quicker thanks to C# class system and prefabs, the editor is amazing. However back in Flash days you had to do a lot of this stuff manually and so a lot of code had to be copy and pasted and reused and tweaked. It was a painful time. I always miss Flash but I think I have rose coloured glasses and forget how limiting the technology really was at the time.

The game took so long to get the bugs out. Whenever you make an RPG game there is so much trial and error of playing it, I frankly can't bebothered even finishing my own game anymore because it's so massive. That's always an irony, the bigger the game the less likely I am to replay my own game. Hah!

I loved doing the skill tree. After all my previous games I finally had gotten really good at it. It was the most fleshed out skill tree I had ever made. The UI was very responsive and nice and the ideas are a lot of fun.

Remade in HTML5

A company decided to pick it up and split profits with me if you see the mobile version floating around. It's decent and brings in a little passive revenue for me. It was cool to see it ported to mobile, I was tempted to do the same with my other games but I just don't think enough of them hold up now. I would much rather remake them completely with a new design and spin for the times.

Everything Together

This game you will see art from almost all my other games. Knights Castle and The Tower especially I used all enemies I had available. Every piece of graphic I could use that would fit I made it work. I think the only thing I regret is not making the battle screens have a bigger variety of backgrounds to progress through.

The game is massive and still has a few small bugs, one with the critical strike doesn't quite add up properly when you use the attribute. Unfortunately its too late to fix....oops.

Overall this game was the best way I could have finished using Flash and move onto Unity and other engines. I am still proud to this day of the result and it is still a fun game to play.

I hope you loved my game Arcalona, and this is the final article about my Flash games. From here on out we are onto new tech. Hope you enjoyed this article mini-series.

Farewell Flash, and hello Unity.