LepreKong 2

LepreKong represents a career stepping stone and a change in my approach to programming.

See the game in action

The project

Our twist on this Donkey Kong spoof was conceived by Aaron Long (character art and animation), Brian Piana (background art and animation), and myself (programming), while working at Bravo Zulu. It was released in 2003 as a supplement to the St. Patrick’s Day Bravo Zulu newsletter and was responsible for a surge in web traffic — as well as countless hours of productivity loss around the world.

Change in approach

Working on this game demanded that I learn about object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts. Without a traditional computer science background, LepreKong allowed me the opportunity to figure it out. Of course, I’m still learning - that’s one of the best reasons to be a web developer - but this provided the base. These OOP concepts have informed my ongoing work in every area of web and multimedia development

Behind-the-scenes

The core programming of the original game was written in Flash 4 Actionscript. Before it was released, we added a second stage of game play, and a few finishing touches using Flash 5 Actionscript.

Early on, we ran into some performance issues. The main character, Sailor Sam, just didn’t move as fast as we wanted him to. We discovered that if we converted the background art into an image - it was originally vector art created in Flash - performance increased dramatically, with minimal impact on the overall aesthetics.

The ladders are actually invisible objects superimposed over the background art. This is where the concepts of OOP came into practice. By writing the behavior of the ladder as an object, I was able to reuse it - at various heights - anywhere in the game without additional effort.

Keeping track of high scores required interaction with our database. Since Flash was unable to query it directly, I set up a couple of coldfusion scripts to handle the job. The game communicates with the coldfusion page seamlessly to perform read/write operations on the database.

The wrap-up

In the end, LepreKong delivered results. Not only did it drive traffic to the Bravo Zulu website, it was showcased as an example when a client needed Flash work or gaming projects. People enjoyed playing LepreKong, and as you can see, they still do.