We really managed to pack in a lot of fun this weekend. I saw Alex for the first time in half a year, played some WoW, went on a 17 mile bicycle ride, talked comics with the waitress at California Shabu Shabu, hiked up Turtle Rock View Point, went to a BBQ, went swimming, indoor rock-climbed, worked on my game, almost finished a DIY vinyl toy, and watched Scott Pilgrim.
I’m beat.
Has it been long enough that I don’t have to be embarrassed by this? Beatbot the Beatbox was a game that I attempted to make a game development course at UCI. It never got anywhere near completion. You can read more about it here, where you’ll also find a PowerPoint presentation, documentation, and the download.
Excuse the bad art. They’re placeholders. I’m not an artist.
I finished the parser and data structures to hold terrain (ground, walls, ceiling, etc.) tiles. Of course, they will likely be changed over time to accommodate new types of tiles, because right now I only have one – grass. The point is that it works and that at this point it can go through the entire data structure of tiles during each update without any slowdown.
I’ll probably want to add a second tile type soon just to make sure parser and data structures can handle different types. I guess I should expect error and add in some error handling for when the data file has incorrect characters in it.
And then I’ll be on to gravity and, with it, collision detection for the ground.
I’ve been thinking that documenting my work on Mr. Bear’s Adventure might press me to work on it a little more. It’s a basic platformer (or it hopefully will be) that I’ve been attempting to make. The idea isn’t to make some fantastic game; rather, it’s to just make a platformer at all. The only way to get practice is to churn out some simple games.
I had already created some sprites and done character movement, excluding any kind of collision detection or gravity. So, I hadn’t done much of anything yet actually. When I returned to work on it, I started on the parser to read external data files containing the level layout. Along with it, I started working on the structures used to store the levels.
