Game Geek Speak

Well, it’s not much. It’s certainly not representative of the real thing. But it shows some progress. Box2d handles collisions, game entities are defined in XML as a series of component definitions, and soon there will be much more interactivity in this little game world.

(Hrmm. WordPress seems to shrink the images even when I tell it not to! The one I uploaded is slightly bigger and less fuzzy than this one. Do a “right-click->view image” and you’ll see the slightly larger one. The engine version is wrong. It’s more like 0.3.0 now, but still Alpha.)

The red-tinted parts show the “entity” layer where all the fun stuff happens. The other layer is “above” the entities and so they can appear to be under it. No technical limits on the number of layers, and each one doesn’t add much to the rendering workload since the engine only renders the strips that appear when a tile-boundary is crossed (ie, vertical or horizontal strips on the edges of the screen).

The tiles are something I got from RPG Maker, I think. The avatar is by Greg (Lila Dreams’ visual designer and my long-time collaborator).

Here’s the editor, first showing tile editing mode.

And here is map “attribute” mode where you define what tiles are blocked or not. Eventually this will be expanded and refined so that you can create Box2d polygon shapes right in the map, but that’s a long way off. For this game project, the needs are simple, so this does fine.

I am keeping mum as to the nature of the game being made, but expect to see more of it as things progress this busy month.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 11th, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.