Hello RB Whitaker's, great idea opening this thread, thanks! I agree with your “RULES & GUIDELINES”, I think I have the requirements to publish my game project. I have taken some official images like a portion of “The legend of Zelda” map; I hope that’s not a problem.
Ok, to the point, I have no much time now to write a nice introduction but as soon as I finish my studies and also the project, I’ll modify this post and make it look nicer.
You can download it from FileBox : http://uploading.com/files/24bm572m/The%2BLegend%2Bof%2BPilla%2BPilla.rar/
THE GAME:
Pilla Pilla is the Spanish name of the game were you have to catch someone. In this game, some kind of packman has to catch a little girl in the Zelda Map.
I have not added any rules yet, no scores, no catch ending, nothing, just the engine to move though the map and the characters without fixing its bugs (like the packman eye that is transparent)
THE CONTROLS:
ASDW for the Little Girl
UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT for the Packman
I am going to point out some features I have added.
THE TEXTURES:
I have added a Texture Class that gives possibility to switch skins. Moving and stopped displays different animations, it has some preloaded skins and it’s really easy to add more in the way I have implemented it.
Auto map Zooming for both players:
The zoom is a media of the two player’s positions and the borders are cropped to fit the screen. The closer the players are the bigger and slower speed that all gets. (I’ll explain the speed feature next).
Acceleration / Deceleration for zooming increase:
To make it more smooth while zooming the map, I added a progressive zooming approach saving real state and making a fake approximation of the real position. This may put the player out of view sometimes if he moves to the edge really fast.
Speed change by distance.
The closer the players are, the slower they go, just to make it less boring to reach each other when they are far away. The only problem with this is that, the faster they go, the more distance it takes in each step. This has a collateral effect that, it can access some areas that in normal speed wouldn’t, and if once in the forbidden area, the other player comes closer, the first player will be stuck there and won’t be able to get out until the other player gets far away again.
Bitmap color collision:
It has two functions for ground collision; the one that is using right now is based on asking for the pixel color that the player next position is on, and compare it with an allowed list of walking road allowed colors.
I had to remodel the entire map colors in order to specify where players could move but it's impossible to appreciate it visually because I only altered 1 bit of each pixel just so it gets different values for the colors that matches for road walking and walls. I also modified some walls and cut some trees out since the original map 4096x4096 was not supported by XNA, so I had to cut a 2048x2048 portion of the map that was boring by itself and needed more shortcuts. That’s why you may find some things that should not be there (for those who knows Zelda).
Auto Cheat for obstacles
If there is an obstacle, the normal thing to happen is to get stuck. It was a nightmare to walk though the map getting stuck in every little wall pixel. With this function avoids getting stuck.
If it cannot move there, a trigonometric function starts to try to move to both sizes in a circle range in a total degree of 120º for each side. This makes it really easy to navigate though the map.
Well, it has more stuff and I wanted to add more details like the ability to cast spells when they are far away from each other like launching missiles or something like that. But it turns out I have no much time left of studies and I will have to abandon it for a while.
Hope you like it and thanks again RB Whitaker's for your interest by opening this thread.
Regards-
PS: BTW: It has been my first developed game. I have never programed in c# neither but yes in c++ that is similar, that's why you may find weird things in the code or the classes. And pointing out one last thing, I wouldn't ever have started this project idea if it weren't for RB Whitaker's tutorials that are the easiest game tutorial I have ever found. Keep it up RBW.