First Update of 2014!

It’s a new year and The Fancy Pants Adventures has an entirely new engine! I spent most of last year learning AS3 and building some Fancy Pants with it, which is the main reason I had even less to post about than usual.

I tried to start that year off with a video, but then everyone in the house got sick and I only got halfway through recording it. Until I can get back to that, though, I wanted to make a summary post of what’s going on at the moment.

New engine, new feel

Moving to AS3 lets me do some pretty cool new stuff, but my first priority is to make sure FPA feels and controls better than ever before. I worked on having a weightier jump and more consistent acceleration, as well as better control over steep slopes. Nearly everything has been rewritten and rethought from the ground up, though, so I hope you can feel the difference!

New features for future FPA

Now for the cool stuff! I’ve expanded moving platforms to moving walls and moving ground pieces. Organic, hand drawn ground are a big part of FPA’s identity, so now parts of that ground can move, rotate, rock, stretch, and spring.

Enough talk, give us something to play!

Yes, yes, here it is!

Fancy Pants Moving Grounds Test

And One More!

I’ve also been working on some crazy networking stuff (crazy for me, at least). It’s in there if you want to register on BorneGames.com to check it out, but I’ll save most of that for its own post.

26 Comments

  1. kristoffernolgren

    This is really cool! Some feedback

    *I really love the vertical sliders, it’s hard and fun! It’s a bit weird that you can stick to them for that long, but you get used to it quickly

    *I think it was pretty hard to time the jumps on the bouncy-things. Mostly, i ended up not bouncing at all and falling of instead. It broke the normally amazing flow of fancy pants.

    *It would be really cool with “physical objects”, like the big boulder in the beginning of level on but that for example spun based on where you or enemies were positioned on them. or if you hit them with a snail.

    *Wawing arms while in the air – amazing

    *multi-layer-stuff amaizing. It would do for a great suprise if you introduce after a couple of levels, maybe you get to play one layer of the level and then, later in the game have a deeper layer in the game that was there from the beginning. It’s kind of annoying that you can’t always return from a layer that you just left. Maybe if you exited a level on the right, instead of it ending you might enter the level on the next layer, making you run back and forth the the entierty of the level.

    *Racemode would be great in multiplayer, specially with weapons and levels with different routes.

    • theginjaninja

      I thought timing my jumps on the bouncy things was fine, I just jumped when it felt natural, and I got really high.
      keep trying 😉

  2. jackhall

    Hey Brad! It’s been a reaaallly long time since I’ve been around! I’m soo happy you got back into fancy pants adventures and that I can see more content appear soon. I viewed the preview, but for some reason, the baddies didn’t seem to spawn when I was playing. I then reset it and the blue squares disapeared completely. Anyways, Stay fancy! :pants: :fpm: :mrgreen: And I will try to get back on this forum again!

    • Brad

      Thanks! Stick around and play some builds! They should be spawning… Then again I tend to break things here and there as I’m working on the game. I don’t think the blue blocks are being set up to respawn when the level is refreshed, just another thing in the huge list of things to do!

  3. yron8

    Pressing B makes a shell appear on your cursor.
    Pressing P creates a new player(or a dummy I think?)
    I just found these by pressing random keys on my keyboard.

  4. RockinPIXARdude

    @Brad. Do you remember me? I was one of the first ones to suggest for you to add FPA to the iPhone. I recently got an android phone and I think it would be really awesome if you could add Fancy Pants Adventures to the Google Play store!

    • Brad

      I was having trouble getting it to work in CS5 (did the Flash Player 11 export update thing but it wasn’t really stable), but I’m currently on a CC trial which seems to fix a weird CPU usage issue I was having. I’ll have to look at it again though. You know much about it? Can I run the backgrounds in starling and the player as a vector movie clip on top of it? There’s no way I want to have thousands of sprites for the player during runtime, the CPU usage saved for the player character would be negligible compared to the backgrounds scaling and scrolling.

      Wish I could just run Scaleform in Stage3d…

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