For some reason, I just wasn’t able to get a good start yesterday. Starting to catch up now I think.
Click here for my in-progress builds (Requires Flash Player)
Sticking the rest of this behind a read-more tag, since there’s a bunch of images.
So… the general idea of my game is that there’s a group of islands, populated by an endangered animal (currently, a striped kiwi). An invasive species (not yet finally named) has arrived, and the player’s job is to eradicate the invader.
No idea why it’s a kiwi. I drew it and the invader last night before falling asleep. I probably need to re-draw both.
The basic rules- untested as of yet.. are
– The player can place traps, and walls.
– Traps will kill any animal that steps on them (good or bad)
– Walls will permit movement of the kiwis, but not the invaders
– Player gets resource points every second which he/she spends on the traps/walls
– Animals can walk on shallow water, but not deep water
Anyway, to explore the ruleset, I need to be able to visualize what’s going on. So, thus far I’ve been working on getting a map working. Much as I’d love to have procedurally generated islands, I could see spending all of the remaining time trying to get an algorithm to work. So I just free-hand(ish) drew some:
I say free-handish, because I used the path and stroke tools in Gimp, to draw the islands, and then went back over the image with a pencil tool to ensure that the image only had 4 colors in it. More on that in a sec…
Now, I figured that map was too ugly to display to the player, so I screwed around with various filters and effects (mostly creating noise, and then using that noise as a bump map) to get a (slightly) more aesthetically pleasing map for player use.
(I’ll admit to having the artistic ability of a year old turnip, but I like this map a little better) Now I have a scale problem… my island fauna are tentatively 32×32 sprites, which would be too large for my islands. I need at least one, and probably more levels of zoom, right?
Going back to the original 4-color map, I read that map in pixel by pixel using getPixel32(). The returned color sets each tile’s type (Sand, Jungle, Deep Water, etc), which is stored in a 2d map array. When the map array is created, it also generates a random offset for that tile, which is used to pick a rectangle out of a base tile to represent the terrain. This, for example, provides 50, 20×20 Deep Water tiles:
This seems to work adaquately, though as you can see, I need to lighten some of the darker pixels in my first level of zoom:
However, at this point I’ve spent way too much time on aesthetics (and explaining(!!)) so it’s time to get to populate my islands and get some dynamics working!
-TF
After 3.14 days of work (2 learning how to use the game maker and 1.14 days of work on the game itself) it’s finally almost over! Just some few sprites and dialogue, and a little testing and it’ll be ready.
playable is embedded in te full post.
