I've finally decided what to focus on with this blog - developing a general purpose game library to assist in helping people make games easier. I'm actually writing a lot of base code to use in my own games (like the hittest function i blogged about earlier). At the moment, i can't find a decent fairly complete set of libraries to do basic things needed for games in actionscript 3. Theres a lot of good stuff out there, but none of it is integrated with anything else, so you have to spend a fair bit of time hacking things together. So i've changed my mind as to this blog's use - i was going to use it to post snippets of code here and there when i found out things in AS3 to help someone learn it like i am doing, but theres quite a few sites out there doing that already and plus you can't really produce lots of really helpful code in small snippets.

     I have a long list of things i want to integrate into the game library. I haven't picked a name yet, i'll probably use AIA components for now and think of something better later - or you can name it for me! I'm going to try and develop classes as i go along, and provide those classes in my blog - so that if you follow it, you'll hopefully pick up some useful classes and small examples of how to use them (i'll try and knock up a decent test for each group of classes to check it works somewhat). The main things i'm going to concentrate on are

• Animated Sprite Class (from sprite sheets)
• Tile Class / Animated Tile Class (for backgrounds)
• Map Class / Scrolling Map Class (with layers & collisions & loading from xml)
• Map / Level editor (probably a flex app using the AIR projector for file access)
• Collision classes (rectangle, circle, pixel)
• Tweening System (with concurrent or sequencing, delays, repeats / back and forth etc)
• UI classes (buttons, sliders, groups, skinable)
• Various rendering techniques (seperate sprites, layers, bitmapdata, copypixels, off stage rendering)
• "Seedable" random class
• Anything else i need in my games and any good suggestions :)

I'm currently working on the animated sprite class - which i'll tidy up and make a quick example and blog about soon. If anyone can think of anything else they'd like to see then leave me a comment and if i can i'll add it to the todo list. I'll also make a page where you can always grab the latest versions of my classes and there may be new classes added that i'll blog about in the future - so you can play around with them first. Remember that this is a long term project and will take up pretty much all of my blogging time - but i hope it will be useful to a lot of people starting out programming games in AS3. Just don't expect a whole game based AS3 engine to appear overnight!