Mr Sun Studios - Just another WordPress site

First of all, let me tell you what the Game Development Spotlight. In this series, I will take a game that I’ve created, and tell you of my experiences making it. Well, let’s get started.

The first game that I ever made using Flash was Glowsticks, a simple platformer with interesting graphics. This was created at a time when I had no idea how to program anything. I only vaguely knew the principles of game development. I was only able to make this game by using a Cartoonsmart tutorial. Just as a side note, those tutorials are great if you want to get into programming, but not if you want to be a good programmer. Anyway, I didn’t really do any of the coding myself, but let the tutorial show me how to do it. I had a lot of fun making this one, and it was a great learning experience

But, the game turned out to be a mess. Once I finished it, I wasn’t able to easily go back and add levels or make changes. It took much effort to update it into Glowsticks v1.5, and to be honest I only did it to get more traffic to my site. Back then, I didn’t know much about reusable code, so in many instances, I copied and pasted the same code in many different frames so if I wanted to change one small detail, I’d have to change all of them. That part wasn’t so fun.

Another problem that the game had was that it was way too hard. Many of the people who played it weren’t able to get to the boss, who I made extremely hard. This lesson taught me to make my games easier, therefore more fun to play.

To conclude, Glowsticks wasn’t my best work, but it was the best game at teaching me about code. It was the basis for my learning of all the scripting and programming languages I know, including PHP and AS3.