I was digging through some of my old files from college and stumbled upon my earliest experiments with ball and ramp physics in Flash.

These were created on August 25 and 26 respectively back in 2006 as part of a homework assignment for Dan Chapman’s Interactive Motion Scripting course at the Art Institute of Portland. We were working through chapters 9 and 10 of the ActionScript 2 edition of Keith Peters’ Foundation ActionScript Animation.

The first draft of my homework used assets directly from the examples in the book. You could click, drag and “let go” of the balls to throw them, but there was no interaction with the randomly generated ramps (referred to simply as “lines” in my original script).

It wasn’t long before I added drag events to the ramps, which resulted in this:

At this point I became a little frustrated with the white and red, so I created the style that would define the look of Ramps Classic. I also took a stab at ramp rotation, though only on the rightmost point:

It’s fun to look back to the beginnings of this fun project. It shows me the value (and fun) of building things just for the heck of it.

It also makes me very, very glad to have a collaborator now. Physics are hard to troubleshoot by yourself!