The Final Countdown
My last update before submissions are due.
Working tile map
This is my tile map that I got working last night. I can create new levels in TilED and easily import them into my game.
Collision boxes
About 20 minutes ago I got the collision box generation working. You can sort of see how my tile graphics are designed in this shot.
I obviously won’t have a working game done in the next 35 minutes, but it was a valiant effort I believe. What was missing before I would consider this a game:
- Collision detection and response.
- Enemies with some basic pathfinding / AI.
- The main gameplay element: mind controlling the enemy.
Let me do a re-cap on what went right and what didn’t go according to plan:
- The Spartan framework along with Slick2D was great for getting a jump start on the simple stuff. In a few hours I had a game shell with splash screen, moving player, camera focus, and mouse rotation.
- TilED was great for designing levels. I had a basic arena map done in a matter of minutes.
- GraphicsGale saved me when GIMP was repeatedly crashing.
- I hadn’t thoroughly used the Spartan framework, so I was unsure how to go about creating new modules for game Entities (Actors). When it came time to add enemies and pathfinding, I was completely stumped.
- I hadn’t ever used Slick2d’s TilED loader before. It took me some time to figure out how to use and manipulate the tile map once I had it in my game.
- I hadn’t ever drawn tileset graphics before. I wasted a bunch of time drawing and redrawing tile graphics to get something usable. Also GIMP crashed on me quite a few times, ruining my work.
The moral of the story seems to be: know your tools and libraries. Much time could have been saved if I didn’t need to fumble around with the tool or dig through the API docs.
Maybe next time I will put together something playable!
Tags: journal, screenshot