Overview
Landry Academy’s Computer Camp 2012 had five students, ages 15 and 16, many of whom had never touched a compiler before this class.
On the first day, we spent several hours installing the tools that we needed to create games. We had a brainstorming session while we waited for the installers to do their magic, planning what type of game we would build. I was campaigning for a Rock Band / Guitar Hero style game, but the class decided to design a platformer game (ala Super Mario Bros.).
A cartoony hero walks around a factory / lab complex jumping on the heads of killer robots to destroy them. There are two flavors of robot: the Hoverbot who quickly floats towards the player, and the Tankbot who moves a little slower, but fires missiles at the player at regular intervals. When a robot is destroyed, it drops a gear (likely) or a heart (less frequently). The player’s score is the number of gears collected.
The game’s art is a collection of doodles that I did in Adobe Illustrator, feverishly churning out assets each evening in an attempt to stay a step ahead of the class. The main character is the result of a tutorial that I followed over at idleworm.com.
The plan to make a platformer turned out to be too much work for a week-long project. We cut features, and ultimately decided to turn the project into a survival game.
The 2012 Camp game can be downloaded from the following URL:
http://camps.moreoncode.com/Camp2012/
Our Game
I’ll give you a break from my attempts at being a game artist. We’ll use Kenney’s assets to create a similar game. This new game will support one to four players. They will start off in the center of the screen and baddies will approach from each side.
The waves of baddies increase in frequency and size as the game goes on. Players fight off the hordes until each meets their inevitable doom. The last player standing wins the game.
I said “one to four players”, didn’t I? I guess you could play this one solo, but you’ll always be the winner. I suppose you can play to see how long you last on your own, but at its core, this is meant to be a multiplayer game.
Oh, I almost forgot another important addition to this game. The players can move left and right, as you might expect, but also towards and away from the screen. Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?
You’re probably thinking that we will just use the Y component of each player’s location to dictate their distance from the screen. And you’re quite right. But players can also jump in this game, so we’ll need to introduce a Z component to the players’ locations.
To keep it all from becoming too confusing for the player, each avatar will have a shadow below it so that you can easily tell their position in the game world, even when they’re jumping. The Z value will be combined with the Y value for the avatar when we draw them, but their shadow will ignore the Z component. The shadow simply shows the player’s relative X and Y to the other players and the enemies.
Summary
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Review Questions
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Exercises
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