Historical allegrocreategames, Revision 2

Creating games with Allegro

Firstly some game theory - there's plenty of stuff written about it out there (google search), read away to you heart's content, but this is what it boils down too :-

  • if it's too easy it's rubbish
  • if it's too hard it's rubbish
  • if you're doing the same stuff over and over, and not getting anywhere, it's rubbish

So it's all about the balance, keep testing and retesting and tweaking, until it feels right.

Next, start with an idea, a goal (reward), and challenge (risk) - the harder the challenge, the better the reward, and start putting down your idea - write design goals and ideas as comments on the first page of your code, and keep referring back to it, keep it simple, and if you add stuff, make sure it makes sense.

So let's go through a simple design process, with euallegro as it's foundation. This game has been done probably a hundred times before by the way, but it's a simple enough concept. It's title is 'Revenge of the Robots'.

  • Premise - you've escaped blah blah, robots hunting blah blah, can you survive an ever increasing number of bots??
  • Player starts in a random spot on the playing field
  • Start with a set number of robots
  • Random buildings obstacles to avoid
  • Get to randomly generated exit point on the map (note could have pre built maps - future idea?)
  • When touched by a robot get electrocuted and die - lose a life / restart the level
  • power ups - teleport and extra life, kill some robots

Whats shown on the screen

  • Lives
  • Score (can use simple textouts for this for now)
  • Player
  • Robots

So that's the basic idea sketched out, now some game mechanics. Blitz Basic has an interesting concept, which works quite well with Euphoria - that of entities. Everything in the program is an entity, so each robot is an entity, and the player is an entity. The entity has properties, that dictate everything about the entity, for instance what it looks like, what it's health is, which direction it's going in, how happy or sad it is, and so on. Let's sketch the player entity

Player entity

  • LIFE
  • DIRECTION
  • GRAPHIC
  • ALIVE
  • XPOSITION
  • YPOSITION
  • SHIELD --anyone guess what happens here?

Robot entity

  • ALIVE
  • DIRECTION
  • GRAPHIC
  • SPEED
  • ANGRY
  • KILLALL
  • XPOSITION
  • YPOSITION

So we can create a sequence for the player, and a sequence for the robot. But because we have many robots, all we need to do is copy the sequence as many times as we want for the robot, each robot will be looped through in the game, it properties updated, and it's actions performed. Perhaps you can see there are already some behaviour modifiers in there.

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