It’s about time for another update. I’ve made some fairly significant progress and I’d like to share. The biggest of which is the world map. I finally have a screen where you can walk around and select your level. It was kind of hard to suddenly stop thinking about physics and gravity and hitting stuff and just break it down to moving in the cardinal directions and stopping at a level. But it works.
You’re the smiley face!
Like with the rest of the game thus far, very basic placeholder graphics. What I ended up doing was creating a matrix similar to the level (I’ll explain that shortly) and setup the levels each as nodes. Each node has what direction the player can move in built in, so currently the player is on a node that can only move left and down. If the player hits one of those buttons, they will move in that direction until they hit another node. Pretty easy stuff. I still need to block off the later nodes until the previous ones are beaten, but that can wait.
And as with most sections of the game, new programming means new bugs! Basically if you mash the directions while moving around, there is a chance that you will fly off the map and travel forever. Don’t worry though, I’ll have it fixed before we launch.
As for creating the map, as well as the level, I decided to go with a pretty basic matrix.
For instance: 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 is essentially what that first line of the world map is. The zeroes are empty space, the 1s are the pathways, and 2s are the level node. To create the whole map, it’s just mulitple lines of that. So…
0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 0
As a result, this makes it super simple for me to change the layout of any level or map on the fly and see those changes immediately. It was important to me to make something that worked quickly when it came to these kind of design elements as I knew I’d be doing these steps over and over again throughout the process.
Those -1s can’t be good for that guy
I’ve also made some progress in some of the extra flourishes that I want to appear in the game. I’m not going to go too deep into my design philosophy for it right now, but I like number flying off dudes. A lot. So it was important to me that I had that in here.
Now the inspiration for the code behind it came to me while I was running. And that just meant I had to run that much faster to get home and write it down before I forgot. Basically, when you hit an enemy, or are hit yourself, the game takes the position of where the hit occurred, and draws the number. It then will rise up off the initial point of contact for a period of time before it disappears. It’s a really nice effect that I’m super excited to get working.
So that’s basically where I am with the game. I’ve squashed some pretty serious bugs when it comes to the platforming, but I’m still playing with the numbers and working on that nebulous “feel.” I now have the task ahead of me to get the world map 100% functional. But once that’s ready, it’s time for some real design theory to kick in.
I’ve also got some early art that I may be ready to show next time. As much as I love the stickmen and their red blocks, it’s about time they get the hell outta here!
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