Digger (Omnimaga contest 2013)

[chickendude]

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

[NanoWar]

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

[chickendude]

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

[chickendude]

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.

[Madskillz]

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

[chickendude]

Just thought i'd share the latest pictures:

[NanoWar]

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

[chickendude]

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.