Digital FX Design | Production | Post

Red Invaders is Flash game extension of a print ad promoting our Red Camera and their vast collection of Red accessories. How does this game promote a camera?

Admittedly, the concept is a bit of a stretch – your goal is to destroy these Red creatures, formed of Red parts, and attempt to match DFX’s collection with your own. But who am I kidding? Like most things, the game is merely an excuse to blow things up. And it is really good at that, if I don’t say so myself.

BlitEngine and other Technical Mumbo-jumbo

In order to display the amount of animated objects without obliterating the frame rate, I implemented a process called blitting, as explained in 8-Bit Rocket’s Aseteroids tutorial. I developed my own reusable library for blitting, which I call BlitEngine.

BlitEngine uses BlitCaches to store various images of a GameSprite’s (analogous to a Sprite) state, so a minimal amount of processing is done during the main game loop. To avoid memory issues, it creates the cache dynamically as needed.

Each instance of a GameSprite is obtained through a SpriteFactory, which utilizes Polygonal Labs’ Object Pools. Every instance references the same BlitCache, receiving the necessary image depending on its own state.

Also, to create the explosion forces and part stacking, I used Box2D.

Cool, where do I play?

Click here to play Red Invaders.