Tweet Breaker

puzzle, retro

After looking into the possibilities of the Twitter API I wondered if I could create a game that utilises tweets and makes them part of a game. I came up with two ideas. The first was a space invaders game in which the tweet characters were the baddies. I still like this idea and may even come back to it now that Ive done the hard bit. I decided on this breakout style game which loads tweets in from the API and makes them into the blocks that need to be destroyed. The API was very easy to use but I had to work hard to get to grips with ripping the data out of xml. Thankfully this is a lot easier in AS3 than it was in AS2. The game pulls in fifteen tweets at a time and cycles through them. It will then get fifteen more. This means that the player doesnt have to sit through the tweet loading process too often. The game threw up some nice problems that I had to solve. Earlier versions had the letters appearing as tiles with little gradients on them. But this seemed to cause some slow down so I changed it to the white bubbles. One bug I had with this game was that when a tweet was cleared, I wanted to remove the active ball. However, when I did an invisible ball still continued bouncing around. The solution was to remove the associated enterFrame listener which was moving the ball. Once this was gone, the garbage collector was able to remove the ball completely. I'm pleased with the game but am a little frustrated that there is no (working) way to filter the tweets on language.