Flashing a splash screen

The idea for Elveteka's splash screen was doing something similar to the original Karateka: a text introduction, an initial cut-scene showing the princess being handled to her prison, the title, a shot of the villain's fortress and fade to our hero climbing the cliff where the game starts.

The first part: the intro text and the cut-scene would probably be easier to do in Unity, as they share the same view, elements and movements as the main game.

The splash screen per se was a bit trickier, the plan was to pan the view down from the sky to the villain's castle and add some lightning flash to the sky, to make it more dramatic. Animating a strobe light requires a lot of fiddling with the timeline, with the lightning appearing and disappearing a lot in a short amount of time, and I wasn't sure doing that in Unity or Photoshop was going to be easy.

So I turned to Flash, which was perfect for the job. The only problem was that it had been some years without using it and had forgotten a lot of its use, but if I managed to keep out of actionscript and interactive elements everything would be fine.

The first videos of this playlist are a straightforward introduction of the basics in Flash and were enough to refresh my memory.

Here's a very succinct summary of what I did:

Preparing and importing the assets

The first thing was saving as separate images all the different elements that required any kind of animation, being that movement or any color or alpha change. In my case: the main illustration, the foreboding head of the main villain that was going to loom over the fortress, the lightning, the title, and a bluish, high contrast version of the main illustration.

After that I just click-and-dragged them to the Stage. Easy!

Turning everything into a symbol

In Flash everything that is going to have any sort of animation needs to be a symbol. So the next step was to right click on every image in the stage, choose “Convert to Symbol” and delete them.

All imported assets are kept in the Library tab even when deleted in the Stage. As a matter of fact, the assets can also be dragged directly to the Library, instead of the stage.

Deciding what goes into what

Symbols can reside inside other symbols and have nested animations within them. A very powerful feature which is a bit of a headache when you are learning Flash for the first time.

Probably the part that required more thinking was planning how the elements needed to be nested. I finally grouped everything but the title in a single symbol that moved upwards, so in the screen showed as a downwards panning shot.

Within that symbol there was an animation of the storm, which was just the lightning, villain's face and blue version of the landscape changing alpha through time.

The single element outside that main symbol was the “Elveteka” title which appeared a bit after the vertical panning shot was over. More alpha modification, this one very simple.

I'm still toying with the idea of doing the initial cut-scene with Flash too. The animation and the changing of frames of the characters would probably be the most tricky and arduous part, but it's probably worth a shot.