Ben James :: adventures in gaming

I've started playing around with Flash to try to develop a game idea I've had for a while, it's a Tower Defense type of game (groan, I know, bandwagon) but I've got a few different ideas up my sleeve so we'll see how it goes.

Dad convinced me that I should start blogging my experiences as I go, since this is the first time I've looked at Flash and Actionscript and it might be useful for others to see how I go about solving problems. I've read enough tutorials to know the basics I think, how media clips and their timelines work and what each piece of ActionScript I write actually applies to.

So anyway, the problem I have at this point of development is that I'm still not quite sure how the depth of movie clips within flash interact with clicks coming in. Specifically, I've got a transparent turret 'ghost' that follows my mouse around, showing where the turret is going to go if you place it (typical RTS mechanic), but when I try to click to place the turret onto the game area, the ghost turret blocks the click.

My first instinct was that there would be a way to make a movie clip transparent to clicks, but there doesn't seem to be anything. I had the brief thought that I'd let the ghost catch the clicks and pass them to the game area, but that would get messy. I think what I'll try is placing a movie clip over the top of the game area, make it invisible but collect the clicks with that, and then it can handle anything that needs to happen based on those clicks. I'll let you know how it goes.

In Guitar Hero and Harmonix related news, a whole bunch of Rock Band details just went up on Destructoid, and it's getting me quite excited. I'm now not sure whether I want to buy GH3 with the guitar (which I thought I might after it's details got released, plus it's wireless), or get the guitar version of Rock Band and buy a cheap USB microphone so I can play the guitar and vocals campaigns. Then there's the drums, which sound really fun but will probably be the most expensive of the bunch; I'm going to have some saving to do I think.