Development history for the game: Cell (Part 1)
Cell (Originally Prits and Prots) was programmed in Flex and is currently open sourced here on github.com.
Around 3 or 4 years ago I had a fascination for creating a game that involved evolving nuclei and fighting them against other nuclei. The original game was called Cell and the idea was that the player controlled a cell like organism that contained proteins called Prots that would hold a function or ability for the cell, like attacking or defending. Prots would be created through the Nucleus of the cell, given nutrients or whatever.
The first step was creating the data structures and how they would be displayed.
[First rough of a "cell" body for our game.]
The basic idea was that our cell game would be top-down and consist of a cell of rings that would contain objects to interact with. These objects would be like proteins and give abilities for the cell like attacking or defending. They would come in different colours and be produced from the "nucleus" (the center) of the cell. Since they might be similar to real proteins in a real cell I decided to name them "Prots".
[A cell with the nucleus in the centre and a bunch of prots]
Our data structures consisted of circular linked lists representing the rings to hold prot sprite information as well as rotation information. In Flash it is much easier to have Flash handle sprite rotation than handling it your self, but this makes it more difficult to find the real prot position quickly and accurately.
After adding input from the user via mouse clicking, I came up with a simple demo for handling cool prot interactions here:
[Left click a prot to move it to an outer ring. You can also drag and rotate the ring.]
Next is the how to store our world and handle physics and collisions