Bytesize Adventures
Crafting bite-sized digital worlds

Weekly Update #6 – Player Movement & Level Exporting


Its been a huge week in terms of progress. Here’s a quick list…

– Reworked the tile queue system
– Added a temporary GUI – Please ignore the appearance, its nowhere near final.
– Added player
– Added player movement/pathfinding
– Added the timer
– Added very early experience point mechanics
– Progressed the web based level editing tools (Level DB saving and plist export)

Lets take a look at a couple of the more interesting items from that list. First up, the player movement. You don’t have direct control over the main character. Instead, he will follow the path that you have laid down. The level is based upon a straightforward grid so pathfinding is fairly simple to implement (I have a tile class with edge attributes to determine which edges are open). Your character won’t begin moving until the timer reaches zero, at this point he’ll slowly begin to move along the path. Its your job, during the timer and after, to ensure that your character can reach the destination.

(As an aside, the character you see below is a placeholder. I have an aesthetic in mind and some fun RPG tropes to go along with it :)

Experience point and levelling mechanics are something I want to discuss in greater detail soon. For now I think its enough to say that you’ll gain experience points by laying tiles (only awarded upon successfully reaching the exit) and this will allow you to level your character, receiving appropriate perks/rewards.

Finally, the web based level editing tools are taking shape. Whilst they barely look any different on the surface, beneath the hood I now have a level database. This represents the pool of levels that make up the game. I can save to this and, soon, load from it and modify the items. I’ve also created an export that generates a single plist from all of the level data. My game engine already parses this to generate the level. I’m hoping to access this plist remotely (during development) to give me a near-realitme level editing facility.

Next week I’m going to continue to flesh out the level editing tool and work on an over world map (for now this will just be a list of levels, for speed. I have grander plans for the finished game). I’m also itching to move onto the quest system so I may dabble in that too.

More soon.