Champ Chase

Champ Chase was a project by I-Imagine for the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund's "Champion for Children" campaign. Released as an online flash title as well as a J2ME mobile game, the challenges here were to quickly build a Flash equivalent to I-Imagine's flexible J2ME engine, as well as expand on the company's in-house high score system and communicate with it from flash.

The game is a 2D platformer aimed at educating young players about various dangers they may encounter such as criminals, drug abuse and online predation. This was achieved through a combination of stylized characters associating each concept with a familiar object or animal with typically negative connotations, as well as more direct information provided at key points. The game is simple and fun, placing the player in the role of a protector saving children from these dangers.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Some useful regular expression patterns when porting code between languages

I'm currently moving a lot of code from Java to Actionscript, and regex has been a lifesaver. Here are some of the patterns that proved invaluable, and that would work on most c-style languages. The Actionscript replacements are obviously specific to that language, but changing them for a different output language really would be trivial:

Find non-parameter variable declarations and assignments
Note: this will find returns as well, see the next pattern
(\w+)(\s)(\w+)(;|\s=)

Flash replacement:
var$2$3:$1$4

Will replace:
    int myInt;
    boolean myBool = true;
With:
    var myInt:int;
    var myBool:boolean = true;   

Find resulting returns in Flash
This will match all the wonky return statements resulting from the previous replacement.
var(\s)(\w+):return;

Flash replacement:
return$1$2;

Will replace:
    var true:return;
With:
    return true;

Find parameter variable declarations
(\w+)(\s)(\w+)(,|\))

Flash replacement:
$3:$1$4

Will replace:
    public int foo(int intParam, boolean boolParam) {
With:
    public int foo(intParam:int, boolParam:boolean) {

Find function signatures with parameters in c/java format
(\w+)(\s)(\w+\([\s?\w\s\w+,?]*\))(\s?\{)

Flash replacement:
function$2$3:$1$4

Will replace:
    public int foo(int intParam, boolean boolParam) {
With:
    public function foo(int intParam, boolean boolParam):int {

Find function signatures with parameters in Actionscript format
(\w+)(\s)(\w+\([\s?\w+:\w+,?]*\))(\s?\{)

Flash replacement:
function$2$3:$1$4

Will replace:
    public int foo(intParam:int, boolParam:int) {
With:
    public function foo(intParam:int, boolParam:int):int {

Find numeric types
(,|;|\(|\)|=|\s)(int|long|short|float|double|byte)(,|;|\(|\)|=|\s)

Flash replacement:
Number

Will replace:
    var myInt:int;
    long myLong;
    float foo(byte bar) {
With:
    var myInt:Number;
    Number myLong;
    Number foo(Number bar) {

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