Enup Games

cabol source code - and making a game.

i started making games in the early 80’s. back then things were a lot simpler.
in those days, if you wanted to draw dot on the screen, you needed a program like this:

10 home
20 hgr
30 hcolor=3
40 hplot 10,10

shit, i still remember that! ok, ok - i looked up an apple iie site to remember the hgr command =) and i’m not sure if i can use 3 for hcolor…
these days you need to know like 100 freakin things before you can do the same thing!

so in this post, i’m gonna describe how to build the game cabol. it’s a game i’ve recently made that works inside of adobe’s flash player.

once you get the game built on your machine, you’ll be able to tinker with the program, rebuild it, and see what your changes did to the game. getting other people’s game code was supa-helpful for me, since i was such a miserable book reader.

* note: everyone’s computer is setup a little different. because of this, certain things aren’t gonna work properly for you. if you run into any issues, just leave a comment on this blog, cause there’s a good chance i’ve already run into the problem. your comments will also help me flush out these instructions better. if there’s anything that doesn’t make sense (i.e. what is a flash environment anyway?), just ask. also, i’m assuming that you’re working on a pc. i haven’t done any flash development on a mac yet.

everything i used to make cabol was free.

here’s what you’ll need to get/do:

download/install the adobe flex sdk here.

in the folder you installed flex, there is a subfolder called bin. in this folder is a program called mxmlc.exe. this is the program that will let you build games that can run in a flash environment. you’ll need to make sure mxmlc.exe is in your path.

download/install firefox. it doesn’t matter what browser you use, but there’s an excellent plugin for firefox that makes life very easy.

download/install flash player 9 debug version.

download/install flash tracer, a plugin for firefox.

download/open cabol’s source code.

if the following instructions don’t work, its most likely due to something not being setup properly. just add a commment, and i’ll take a look at what it might be.go into the folder that has cabol’s source code.
in there is a folder called bat (batch files).
run the file called c.bat
this will build the game and put a copy into the folder called bin
in the folder called bin is a file called web.html
start this file to play the game

3 comments May 11th, 2008

cabol, one more time!

cabol is an old macintosh game that i had made in the 90’s.
had 3 versions of the game, cabol ii looked like this.

the new cabol has you growing flowers. quite a bit different from that bar you would protect from getting knocked down to the bottom. i’ve also added pinball like barriers for the later levels, as well as a DOOMSDAY device! =) i think i remember a doomsday device in the old apple iie game called captain goodnight.

every 5th level is a night level which gets obscenely hard. good luck.

i used a library called box2d which handles all the collisions for me. it’s really nice, cause i got some very cool/strange bounces from the balls, thanks to this collision system.

you can play cabol on kongregate: http://www.kongregate.com/games/enupgames/cabol

to the play postcard version (where you can make a flower postcard and send it to your friend), go to : http://www.enupgames.com/flash/cabol/web.php

deepak deo