Dinosaur-Ghost Rampage (Tentative Title)

Hey! I just found these Dev Logs! Neat idea... I'll try to post here regularly.

So, I just wrapped up my last game (http://blastingagent.com) and released it earlier in the month, and I've already started on the next one.
Awhile ago, I tried challenging myself with making a full game a month. One of the games that came out of it was Dinosaur-Ghost Rampage (http://dinoghost.tims-world.com/). It had a simple design: run around and destroy stuff for as long as you can.

The Original

Whenever I go to events and show off my games to people, this one has always been the 'favorite' for some reason. People will sit down and play for way longer than I expect them to, and seem to have a blast. So, it was only natural that I would want to turn this into a bigger, fuller, better game.

First things First, I'm using HaxeFlixel (http://haxeflixel.com), which is the BEST. I am also not an artist, so, a lot of things are going to be programmer/placeholder art until later on.

Thinking about this project, I wanted to try something new that I hadn't done before. So, I decided to try doing an Isometric style, instead of the top-down style of the original. This turned out to be a bigger headache than I thought.

HaxeFlixel doesn't have any built-in isometric stuff, yet. Someone had started working on something, but they never got very far, so, I was left to figure out my own logic. It took about 3 days to get it figured out. Basically, I ended up having 2 versions of everything - I have a regular, 2D Tilemap, and a bunch of regular, square, 2D objects that handle movement and collisions, and then I link a special IsoObject to each of those 2D objects which get placed on the screen based on their 2D counterparts. This way, I don't have to do any complicated Isometric movement logic or collision, I just let everything play out in 2D space as per usual, and then adjust their projections into Iso-space accordingly. It also allows me to stick all 2D stuff into it's own camera and turn it into a minimap!

2D Mapping

Once I had this figured out, it was pretty easy to get the player's movements working, and a simple enemy-tank which pathfinds around the map looking for the player.

The eternal struggle: Dinosaur-ghost vs Tank

The next fun bit I decided to mess around with is more of a style-thing. If you notice in the original game, there's something missing: no cars and no people running around in panic. I decided to fix that.

I drew up a super-simple dude and put him in the game. Whenever a building is destroyed, some random number of dudes pop out and run around until you step on them or they get run over by a tank. Hey - life is hard for pixel-folk. Now, I didn't want to just have one dude and populate the city with clones, and I didn't want to sit there and draw 100 different dudes, so, I looked into something that I had heard of: paletteMap. Once I figured out exactly how to use it, it turned out to be simpler, faster, and better than I had hoped. I took my dude-sprite, chopped it up into smaller bits, saved the bits in grayscale, and texture-packed the bits. In code, whenever I want to create a dude, I take the bits, pick a random hue for each bit, and then apply paletteMap using that color, and stamp them all together into a new image. It works great.

I used a similar approach for the cars, as well.

Cars and People!

Next up was a fun part. Up until now, I had just made a simple csv for my maps to read from. Again, I didn't want to sit there making 100 maps for my game... I'm too lazy for that. So, I built some functions to generate maps for me. In the game, I have 7 'sizes' of buildings. Each size = how many hits it takes to destroy (and how much energy you get from it when destroyed). For the sake of being easy to see, I made them all color-coded, so the 'weakest' building is purple, while the 'strongest' is red.

I defined a few parameters for my maps - dials that I want to adjust as the game progressses to be able to make harder and harder levels. I came up with: Size (how big the map is), Density (how close the roads are to each other), Level (roughly how strong the buildings are in the map - low level is more purple buildings, etc), and Connections (how many roads exit the city and act as spawn points for enemies).

First, I make a blank canvas using Size, then, I add some perlinNoise to make a random mess of stuff on the canvas.

Next, I blur my image to make it a little smoother between building sizes.

Then, based on my Level, I darken or lighten the image some amount - this ensures that I have more buildings of the right size for my Level.

Next, I use threshold to apply the color for each of my building-strengths to the map, based on the darkness of the pixels.

Finally, I carve roads and connections onto the map based on Density and Connections.

The life cycle of a map

And that's is! I pass the final image over to the map building logic and it creates the actual tilemap based on it.

Map made of parameters: Size = 50, Density = 3, Level = 8, Connections = 6

...and that's just about where I am right now! I've added a few other minor things, like the player's 'energy' bar at the bottom of the screen and the 'Destruct-O-Meter' on the right. I'm still playing around with different win conditions and things, and working out how the game is going to play out. I think the next thing I want to work on is a world-map, and the start/end for each level... we'll see how it turns out.

Thanks for reading this, I hope you enjoyed it!