is a 2D Jump-n-Run about the adventures of a Guerilla Planter / Pakour Traceur on a mission to reacquaint his city with nature, while creating a safer environment for its citizens on the side. The game was a project commissioned by the Climate Media Factory and designed to draw attention to Climate Issues. In collaboration with these climate experts as well as consultation and support by Wooga in regards to design choices and similar aspects we created a jump ‘n’ run that sported solid level design in a world that felt alive and active.
Urban Seed was the first game we did as a group at my university, the Mediadesign Hochschule Berlin, and it was the first game I worked on which was created with Flash/Action Script 3. As the person with the most (self taught) programming skills, I took over the role as lead developer and made important decisions like file naming convention (english or german, who cares!), commenting language (german, of course, because we were all from Germany so why would it be english!), tabs vs spaces (tabs!), programming patterns to use (singleton god class because it’s so convenient!), etc.
shudder
Ok, this sounds worse that it was, even though, as a first ever project with a team, the challenges were big. We had different skill levels, different working hours, never worked in that programming language before and had a hard time to deal with deadlines, design decisions, communication with our commissioners and so much more. But let’s tell this story a little bit more sorted.
As we were in a time of Facebook on the rise, we wanted our game to be playable inside Facebook, including the possibility of competing against one’s friends through a friend-only shared high score leaderboard. As such we quickly figured that we had to provide our game as a Flash application, integrate the Facebook API and provide a dedicated backend service to save the player high scores.
While getting into Flash and ActionScript was…. okay…, we thankfully got help from a friend who knew computers well better than us and provided us with a PHP written service using SQL as a database which was able to handle the Facebook user token verification server-side and communicate with the client through HTTP POST and GET calls.
The client team, consisting of 4 people, created the app outside of Adobe Flash using ActionScript 3 and compiling it with Adobe Flex (now Apache Flex) using FlashDevelop for Windows. Later we would also integrate the “Green Book”, which was built inside Adobe Flash and exported as an SWC file.
To get us started we decided to make use of the FlashPunk engine, to build platform levels we used the Ogmo Editor and for version control we used Tortoise SVN, running a server in our class room.