Revolution Software

Another little project, this time (possibly) a graffiti game. I was thinking you'd have to go around collecting paints, dodging police, rival crews, finding nice walls to paint on, etc. I haven't quite gotten everything figured out in my head yet, but i'm working on it.

Here's a screenshot of the engine so far:


There are still quite a few glitches with the jump detection, but for now it supports tiles with variable (Z) heights (you can see the two tables, one has a height of 8 the other a height of 4, and the trash can has a height of 5).

And just now i was thinking that the engine would probably work fairly well in a skateboarding game... The only thing is i'm not quite sure how to handle ramps. Once the contest's over maybe i'll look into it some more

Haha, you are the master of tilemaps. Looking really interesting. How do you handle the z-coords? And why can he jump so high?

I'm still working out the kinks, but essentially i just added an extra Z variable. When you jump, it subtracts how many pixels high you are from the player sprite drawing routine. I gave solid tiles a height attribute and when you run into a solid wall it compares the two heights. If you're high enough in the air to pass over it it lets you go. But jumping doesn't touch the player's X/Y coordinates on the map.

And the shorter jumps looked a little whimpy, but i agree that it's too high. I've still gotta finetune that part. And it might look like he's jumping higher because my sprite routine doesn't have Y clipping yet

I'm also starting to think up some ideas for drawing the graffiti. Maybe you'd have to press a button over and over and the tag will slowly show up (i was thinking of randomly setting bits in a mask until the whole mask is set up). I'll have to play around with it a bit but i think it'd be a nice effect. Plus it'd take longer to do larger pieces, which'd make sense and would make it more difficult. Still a little unsure about the game aspect, though.

And for an NPC system, i was thinking i could maybe generate some NPCs on the fly (or spawn them based on location) and give them a timer. When they appear on screen, the timer gets reset, and when they're offscreen the timer counts down. When it reaches 0, the NPC is deleted. That way i can hopefully avoid too much slowdown with lots of NPCs.

Anyway, just some thoughts floating in my head for now.

EDIT: Oh, and i love writing tilemaps

Here's the latest screenshot:


I also started to add in graffiti support and started working on how i want to handle the painting process.

Ha cool, always like seeing your stuff Chickendude.
Cool idea with the z-coordinates I like the effect.

Just thought i'd share the latest pictures:

I'd love to see some more different underground tiles Looks fun. The police has no walking anim?

The tiles are all just placeholders for now, and i've been trying to write a decent pathfinding routine first. The cops will eventually have a walking animation, i've just been trying to work on other parts right now

I might end up dropping the steps idea and leave the maximum z-height to 8 as currently there're a lot of bugs with that. What works (above 8 pixels/1 tile high) is really just hacked together.

I'd also like to add a little animation for when a tag is completely finished, so you know it's done and can move on to the next.