Back in February 2009, John Brinkman posted a tutorial on Working with Data Fragments. What struck me the most from this tutorial was the fact that a subform can be repeated within a positioned container (I had always thought the container had to be flowed). That lead to an idea for generating instances of random sizes/locations, which eventually led to generating the terrain that forms the basis for the game. Without random terrain on every new game, it would become too predictable.

Over the next 22 months, I worked on and off on this idea of a Tank Wars game in XFA with all the necessary animations to make it as compelling as possible. Of course, XFA caught-up to me and introduced support for Flash in XFA with its latest 3.3 release (along with Acrobat X) which means you could now implement the game in Flash and embed it into a form but where’s the fun in that!?

Behold! … XFA Tank Wars.

Minimum Requirements: XFA 2.8 / Adobe Reader 9.0 / Adobe LiveCycle Designer 8.2.1

Some re-usable goodies you’ll find in there: JavaScript libraries for animations, units, debugging, math (physics), dialogs and utilities.

Game Stats