The basics of an RPG (role-playing game) - Page 2

Now that you’ve got the background it’s time to open up Flash. Open up a new flash document. To start off draw out your character, from a birds-eye-view (from the top), animate it walking in an upward direction, the other directions will be handled in the action script of the game. Label the character “man.”

With your character done it would be best just to draw the background now and keep all the drawing and animating together. Draw your map; ignore logic when drawing it by showing the front and top of every building so you know what’s going on in each building. Your map should be several times the size of the visible screen in your game so that the map can scroll, the map only will move and not the character. You’ll need to add in some extra frames to show the inside of the buildings.

Now what you need to do is an inventory for your game. At the bottom of the screen draw any number of boxes i.e. these boxes will show up your items when you find them. Give these boxes the instances slot1, slot2 etc. With these boxes you’ll want to put in around five textboxes, one for health, occupation, days into the game, name, strength, charm and intelligence. Give each of the textboxes the variable (not instance name!) of what they are (just the one word.)

Now to start off your game insert a new scene (Insert --> Scene) above the existing scene(s) name this scene “Setup”. Name the already existing scene “game” This scene will be used to set-up all the variables. Insert an input text-box give it the variable “name.” The user then can input their own name into the textbox. Make sure you click the box labelled “show border around text” and Max. characters to seven, or whatever you want. Insert another input textbox for Days into the game and do the same for that but set the maximum characters to two and the allowed characters to just be numbers. Insert three more dynamic textboxes for Strength, Charm and Intelligence. Now for some action script insert this into the first frame:

 function randomise () {
_root.strength=random(10)
_root.charm=random(10)
_root.intelligence=random(10)
}