September 21st, 2011

ALPACA Help Open Thread

Hi everyone, I’m going to leave this post up as an open thread for any questions, comments or issues you have using ALPACA. I can’t always answer questions immediately but I’ll do my best to respond promptly. Have at it!

August 24th, 2011

My Little Matrix

To the Internet Dieities, I humbly bestow this offering of The Matrix Reloaded and My Little Pony, mashed up.

July 18th, 2011

ALPACA Tutorial: Exporting to a Single .swf File

A few people have asked about exporting ALPACA projects into a single .swf file – that is, without the data folder and the external music files. This could be a good option for any designers who want their games to be downloadable, or otherwise expect to move them around a bit and don’t want to deal with keeping multiple files in the right places. You won’t be able to easily change your settings, subtitles, or music after you’ve exported your game from Flash, but if that’s not a problem, this is a quick fix.

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June 15th, 2011

This Might Be A Thing: Retro HTML5 Animation

A little test I put together using Hype, a new app for creating animations entirely in CSS3 and Javascript. It was surprisingly quick and easy. The interface is still a little rough around the edges but there’s great potential here. Expect to see some more of this soon.

May 27th, 2011

Creating Your First ALPACA Game, Part 4: Inventory Items and Puzzles

Click here for part 1 of the Create your First ALPACA Tutorial

We’ve got our character, our environment, and our primary goal. Now we just need to add a simple puzzle and we’ll have a complete (albeit super bare-bones) game. The player needs to get a keycard in order to use the teleporter. We could just make a keycard and put it on the floor; this would be the same process as making the teleporter, except we’d have to give the keycard a “_G” tag in order to add it to the inventory (in other words, its instance name would be keycard_O_G, making it an obstacle and a Gettable object). But let’s make the first room a little more interactive instead. This will also give us an opportunity to create a Usable object.

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