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Archive for October, 2013

Gold Hunter: Part 2

October 26th, 2013 No comments

Just a quick update here. Added a player to move around the map (he can move sideways and 1 block up as necessary), and he can shoot the ground either down-left or down-right. No fancy animations or anything yet, just playing around with it in my random cave generator. It already brought back memories of planing out how far you’d have to dig out to get to another space in Lode Runner. Although no threats yet to make it interesting. That might be my next plan, is to at least maybe have some random patrolling creatures or two.

I also discovered that you can’t update the image of a SpriteNode in SpriteKit on the fly, you have to remove it and add a new one. I believe you can apply animations to cycle through images and such, but simply changing the image doesn’t work.  You can change the Texture Atlas and coordinates though I think, but I haven’t yet set those up.

First Movement Demo

 

Note: I’m just posting these updates on the fly. If I spend too long on them I’ll probably get bored and give up, so apologies in advance for grammatical errors!

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Gold Hunter: Part 1

October 26th, 2013 No comments

Figured I’d keep a mini blog going on a project I’m working on (because it’s worked so well before) to do a game inspired by Lode Runner: The Legend Returns (later, Lode Runner Online), and reposting it on iDevGames.com. I really liked the no direct-combat style of Lode Runner for planning and running around a level and gathering loot, and I’d like to bring a faster level of twitch gameplay to the old school mechanics, as well as a smaller field of view (rather than exposing the entire map to the player) and maybe play around with ideas of lighting/physics to the game. As you can probably tell, I’ve played a decent amount of the new Spelunky lately, and it’s inspired me to make a similar game.

My first step this week was to mess around with a random level generator. I’m using SpriteKit (technically a KoboldKit wrapper around it, not sure what advantages KoboldKit has for me just yet. http://koboldkit.com).

I started with Big Bad Waffle’s http://bigbadwofl.me/random-cave-generator, because it required no prep work. I just implemented it in Objective-C (using Objective-C NSMutableArrays, probably not the best for performance reasons so that will probably switch to pure C later). It created some pretty good (importantly: re-producible) results based on a seed value I initially drew it using SKSpriteNodes of different colors, but then figured I’d steal the ever-useful Cute sprites available to make a quick map and off it went! I did a little shift in the y direction to make the ground appear a little bit lower just for fun visual effect.

Note: Images used are just for a more interesting rendering of the map, not a decision on style.

map1 map2 map3

 

I’ve also been reading into how Spelunky does their code generation and it’s pretty interesting. Apparently a simple variety of the Drunken Walk algorithm (or something along those lines). More details here from a guy who ported Spelunky to the web and posted his findings. It’s great to create a guaranteed procedural path to an exit. It required a little more setup as you need “rooms” with exits on different sides (and a decent assortment of them as well) in order to get going, but it looks pretty simple and I might give it a try later!

Next up: Making a player able to walk around and blow up walls! Still deciding on top-down, angle, or side view for this game.

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