Day 4 is elghinn day

elghinn on 2011/09/15 01:31 of Minako

So today it's my turn to talk. Lazy Gruik!



I'll talk to you about the level management. Since the begining I have planed to handle the levels like Castlevania: divide the level into tiles like if the whole level could fit in a sheet of LibreOffice calc. It allows to have a simple representation of a level in a plain text file. From this file, we can know the geographic position of a tile in the level and we can load its background image and its informations (like enemies, fruits, etc.).

But we are not in a perfect world: graphists do exist! cha, our graphist, is not very nice with us. So I had to find another idea. After a day of thinking, I finally came with a great one. I realized I did not really need to know the position of the tiles from each other. I just need to know which tiles are linked to each other. I have now a xml file with the tile list and I will have the item list, the plateform list, the enemie list for each of them, with their position. There will be too the list of existing links. With this informations, I will be able to create a graph that represents a level and allows me to know where the player is going when he is changing room.

We do not save any information about the images of tiles and items in the xml file because we can retrieve their names from other informations in this file. For example, with the apple, we only need to know it is a fruit and it is an apple.

When we are playing, we are only displaying the room where is the player. But a tile being small (1200x600px), we allowed cha to use more than a tile at a time to make a room. She was very excited.

And the others guys? They procrastinate! No, I'm kidding (or not).

cha keeped creating assets and doing some level design. We have new fruits, a new level, new animations (for the powers).

Thanks to Gruik, Stan can now use his powers. \o/
He can also fly around like a(n angry) bird. Gruik also upgrade his collision algo to handle more accurately the collisions with platforms.

I hope you will really love this article. Because it's from me and it will be the only one from me during PyWeek #13 (Gruik, if you read me ;).

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Comments

Akake on 2011/09/15 18:31:

I'm confused. What do you mean by "tile" ? o_o When I say "tile" I usually mean a tile in a tilemap or tileset.

Your use of that word kind of confuses me. Could you please explain what you mean?