I decided to switch gears again — definitely the mark of a successful developer, no? Here’s the Tile Slider game prototype in action:
It’s got a couple of gameplay element indicators present. First is the color change for crossing a tile, an “enemy” moving about the playfield, and the ability to speed up the player object.
Since I’ve made some progress, it’s only fair that I do something drastic like moving off of the XNA library for this game. I considered going to Unity or even Moai but decided to man up and start putting my own 2D engine together. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons:
Get an entity/component system up and running. This will be used for everything from the player object to the UI, so I need to get it going now.
XNA isn’t supported in the latest MSFT toolchains.
Reasons.
I’ll be porting to C++/DirectXTK as an interim step and then modifying/replacing DXTK with something that can run on non MSFT platforms in the future.
Not a lot of action yet, but the game engine is reaching some level of functionality:
Right now, the player object (the arrow) will proceed around the track segments which can be moved like a simple sliding tile puzzle. The tiles with a tan background can’t be moved. If you reach a dead end, the board and player object reset themselves and you start again.
I’m currently investigating possibilities for actual gameplay objectives. A few possibilities are:
Traverse every track section as quickly as possible.
Cross a series of stationary checkpoints. Checkpoints could be on the locked-down tiles or on movable tiles.
Collect objects on the tracks. Could be stationary, could be moving.
Avoid the enemy. A set of other objects moving along the tracks must be avoided.
Or some combination there-in.
In the immediate future, I’ll be looking at the following:
Multiple objects moving along the track.
Stationary objects on track sections (checkpoints, powerups, etc)
Collision detection for items 1. and 2.
First re-write of the tile array and moving object code. Their interaction is “suboptimal” at this point and I need to detach them from one another a bit.
As part of the tile array rewrite, I’d like to add a track highlight that shows the active track pieces starting from a tile/track/direction combination to show the current path to be followed by an entity.
This should cover most of my time to work on this project for the next six weeks or so. Let’s see if I can hold to the schedule…
