Representing a Monopoly board in flash?

Question

I'm brand new to Flash (and game programming, really), but want to learn a bit of it. My overall learning project is to create a Monopoly clone in Flash. Unfortunately, I'm struggling to get over even my first hurdle - how to create the board graphically, and how then to deal with it in the code. So far, my thoughts are to break the board down into the different sizes of tiles (the normal property ones, the corner 4 and a large one for the middle section), then somehow place these all in the correct position relative to each other and keep that positioning correct as the pieces (and thus the camera view) move about the board. (And, hopefully some day have a zooming ability too...)

Is this a good approach, or is there a better one? Does anyone know where I can find a tutorial specifically on creating board games in Flash (any sort really, wouldn't have to be Monopoly but just a game that has a board which tokens move across - and preferably which has to pan as well).

Also, as an aside, is there any way to have a dynamically coloured rectangle in a flash MovieClip (like you can have dynamic textboxs)? I ask because it would be useful if there was, as I could generate every property tile with just one MovieClip which took a name, a value and a colour...

Answer 1

Your questions are way too general. I'm sure you don't want us to walk you through your whole project right? Now to gain some experience, I suggest to you simply work through a few flash gaming tutorials. There are a LOT of those, I googled for 2-3 seconds and found this:

http://pelfusion.com/tutorials/35-flash-game-development-tutorials-fla-files/

I'm sure you feel disappointed by this answer, but this is the first step in solving your own problems. The internet has more than enough general game tutorials already. If you have specific problems, we might be of better help to you.

I assume with dynamically colored rectangles, you mean simply changing the color during runtime. Well you simply give the rectangle a name, and change the color property of it in code. Like this: rectangle.Color = Something.

Answer 2

You might want to start out with a simpler project just to learn some of the basics, maybe a little game where the player has to move a rectangle from one side of the screen to the other using the arrow keys or mouse, upon which a score is incremented or something. This will help teach you how the coordinate system works, among other things.

To draw stuff using code, you can create a new Sprite or MovieClip object and use its graphics property to draw primitive shapes (rectangles, etc.) to it at runtime.

Answer 3

everything you describe here you can do pretty easily once you get the hang of component sprites. personally i would make a single sprite that will then hold all of the "tiles" in the game, this would allow you to "zoom" the board while keeping all the pieces relative:

if you create this parent to have an addTile() and getTile(index:int):Sprite method then you can easily push the tiles and retrieve them from an array, so that Go is at index 0, old kent road is at 1 etc. that way you can use a single integer value to determine the position of the player piece as you can then use getTile(int).x etc.

the position of the tiles themselves can be worked out relative to the others. if you have a tile that is 20px wide and 40px high then you can position the tile as x = index * 20 for the first row, after the initial 11, you need to rotate them all and then use the y index instead (rotation = 90; x = 11*20; y = (index-11)*20) this will depend exactly on your origin point of your Sprite.

to draw coloured boxes you use the graphics of the Sprite, there are plenty of tuts on API drawing out there, but here is a basic box of 10x10px:

var drawing:Sprite = new Sprite();
drawing.graphics.beginFill(0x0000FF);
drawing.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, 10, 10);
drawing.graphics.endFill();

Answer 4

Another approach to your question could be to learn about Object Oriented Programming. That may not solve your representing the board graphically straight away, but it would definitely help you structure your game.

With OOP, you could define a "Property" Class with a set of properties such as streetName , color , price etc... I haven't played Monopoly in a while but you can get the general idea, i.e. to create a base object and make it specific by setting the object's properties. Your question about the colored rectangle can actually apply to other properties, a great way to avoid unnecessary repetition.

Broadly speaking OOP tends to emulate real life situations, so you could actually look at your Monopoly game, break it into its various parts, find common properties etc... I won't start a lesson here :) I'd be pretty bad at it, but there's plenty of resources out there . Look for OOP, Design Patterns & Actionscript3.

After a little research, you may find that your question about how to handle graphics may not be such a problem after all.