Coding4Fun

Designing Custom Actors

Although Popfly ships with hundreds of built-in actors, because we're building a LEGO game, we obviously need to build custom LEGO actors. Popfly enables anyone to upload and contribute custom actors into their actor repository, which is what we'll do for our LEGO models. Your graphic design skills may be awesome, but some of us need more help, so we'll use LEGO's free Digital Designer application, which enables you to build 3D LEGO models in a drag-and-drop environment. Digital Designer also has a large user community where users upload and share their own custom LEGO models. For LEGO Soldier, we'll download and customize several user-created LEGO models for a LEGO tower, a lab, and more.

To build our custom actors, we need to do a couple of things:

1. Design a LEGO model using LEGO Digital Designer

2. Export one or more screenshots of the LEGO model we want to use

3. Trim any extra whitespace in the image

4. Upload the image to Popfly

5. Build some very basic XAML to hold the image

6. Build a new actor in Popfly

Designing a LEGO Model Using LEGO Digital Designer

To build our Main actor model, open up LEGO Digital Designer, select Choose Free Build, and expand the Brick Palette, which contains the list of available LEGOs. Now that the designer is open, you can begin building LEGO models by dragging-and-dropping bricks onto the design grid. Figure 2-5 shows the final actor design of the Main actor in LEGO soldier. This was built by simply snapping together LEGO bricks piece-by-piece ...