Sunday, November 16, 2014

Moving Right Along

Both Robo-Ninja and Atari Anguna have been moving forward the past few days, although I haven't had much interesting to say about them.

On Robo-Ninja, I've finally gotten far enough along in the mapping where I can finally assume that, by this point, the player has most or all of the powerups from the first 2/3 of the game. Meaning I can finally switch up a lot of the level designs to force all sorts of difficult combinations and toggling of abilities.  For example, in room "cave_10":


If you can follow my horrible paintbrush drawing....you start dropping down at the purple arrow on the right. You have you double-jump at the blue part, and while in the air, change the "ground action" ability to slide instead of jump, so you can slide under the wall (orange). Then immediately toggle back to jump (and make sure your wall ability is set to wall jump) to handle the yellow jumps. Then you have a very short stretch to toggle your in-air ability from double-dump to the "slam down" ability, so you can slam and avoid the spikes (red).  This only took me about 25 or 30 tries in testing, so I figure the challenge level is about right :-)

(Of course, I was purposely avoiding using the slow motion powerup, which I'd expect somebody to use at this point. Especially because I put one at the gray square there near the beginning, to make sure you have at least one, and to remind they player that it exists)

I'm still putting off my work on the title cutscene though. I just keep thinking it's going to be a lot of work for what amounts to be a really ugly-looking cutscene.




In Atari Anguna land, I've been working on the transitions between rooms. This means fleshing out my room definition code (which previously only had the wall definitions) to also include color scheme, what enemies are in a room, any special state for doors (requiring a key, requiring all enemies to be killed, fake walls, etc), and what item rewards might be in a room.  So far, I'm only as far as colors and enemies. Just tonight I got it rigged up so enemies spawn semi-correctly when you move from room to room.

The part I need to figure out next, is the best way to randomly distribute the enemies in a room, but without spawning them in a wall. Do I randomly drop them in, and if it's a collision, try again? This could take a long time in rooms with a lot of walls. Or do I drop them in, and try nudging them around until they don't collide? That could give really weird results, if I nudge them the wrong way. And what's the best way to detect collisions as I'm spawning them? Trying to compute the mapping between screen coordinates to wall collisions is hard on the atari, it's WAY easier to let the collision detection do it, but that only happens once per frame. So do I do the math myself, or do I waste a bunch of frames trying to arrange my enemies before the player is allowed to play the level?

I'm sure I'll figure it out, but my brain is too tired to properly answer those questions right now. (although I'm leaning toward repeatedly random dropping them in, but giving up after 10-15 tries. And I think I can make the background, walls, and enemies all be the same color as I'm trying to position the enemies, so if there's a 1/4 or 1/2 second loading per room, at least it won't look stupid with the enemies bouncing around trying to get positioned.  (But I'm not 100% sure that that will work))

3 comments:

Bryan R said...

The random enemy placement problem reminds me of playing Battleship. Except in this case, you're trying not to hit the walls (ships).

Maybe there are some simple Battleship strategies you can employ. Such as, if your first drop towards the upper left hits a wall, try next time in the lower right.

yllawwally said...

Perhaps you could keep a list of locations that are safe, and then randomly choose from the list instead of checking for safe locations. You should have plenty of ROM, to store the list. Maybe only 8 locations on any one screen.

Nathan said...

That's not a bad idea, yllawwally. I'm planning to reuse a limited number of room layouts across multiple rooms, so having a few "safe zones" might work, and might not use up too much ROM space.

NES Anguna

Well, I had a little bit of time still, while Frankengraphics is finishing up her game Project Blue, to have a little downtime on Halcyon, s...