For some reason, I just wasn’t able to get a good start yesterday. Starting to catch up now I think.
Click here for my in-progress builds (Requires Flash Player)
Sticking the rest of this behind a read-more tag, since there’s a bunch of images.
So… the general idea of my game is that there’s a group of islands, populated by an endangered animal (currently, a striped kiwi). An invasive species (not yet finally named) has arrived, and the player’s job is to eradicate the invader.
No idea why it’s a kiwi. I drew it and the invader last night before falling asleep. I probably need to re-draw both.
The basic rules- untested as of yet.. are
– The player can place traps, and walls.
– Traps will kill any animal that steps on them (good or bad)
– Walls will permit movement of the kiwis, but not the invaders
– Player gets resource points every second which he/she spends on the traps/walls
– Animals can walk on shallow water, but not deep water
Anyway, to explore the ruleset, I need to be able to visualize what’s going on. So, thus far I’ve been working on getting a map working. Much as I’d love to have procedurally generated islands, I could see spending all of the remaining time trying to get an algorithm to work. So I just free-hand(ish) drew some:
I say free-handish, because I used the path and stroke tools in Gimp, to draw the islands, and then went back over the image with a pencil tool to ensure that the image only had 4 colors in it. More on that in a sec…
Now, I figured that map was too ugly to display to the player, so I screwed around with various filters and effects (mostly creating noise, and then using that noise as a bump map) to get a (slightly) more aesthetically pleasing map for player use.
(I’ll admit to having the artistic ability of a year old turnip, but I like this map a little better) Now I have a scale problem… my island fauna are tentatively 32×32 sprites, which would be too large for my islands. I need at least one, and probably more levels of zoom, right?
Going back to the original 4-color map, I read that map in pixel by pixel using getPixel32(). The returned color sets each tile’s type (Sand, Jungle, Deep Water, etc), which is stored in a 2d map array. When the map array is created, it also generates a random offset for that tile, which is used to pick a rectangle out of a base tile to represent the terrain. This, for example, provides 50, 20×20 Deep Water tiles:
This seems to work adaquately, though as you can see, I need to lighten some of the darker pixels in my first level of zoom:
However, at this point I’ve spent way too much time on aesthetics (and explaining(!!)) so it’s time to get to populate my islands and get some dynamics working!
-TF
