Walking Martian Craters
I have a bulleted list of todos titled “Mars Game” in my journal. The bullets are broken up into sections with each section ending with a title for this newsletter. This week I was hoping to get these tasks done.
- Hide non-player characters (NPCs) when off the map
- Add walls to maps
- Add doors to maps
- Add obstacles to maps
- Write “Find the randos” newsletter.
Walls are done and I have a working “game” where you can chase an “alien” through a maze. You can download it for Apple computers here and for Windows computers here. I worked a bit this week on the download process so if you downloaded last week and found it hard to get it running on Apple, I think things are better. Windows users, I have no way to run the software I’m sharing with you so if it doesn’t run please send screen shots or whatever you can my way so I can try and get it working for next week.
If you read the above closely, you might see that I didn’t mention hiding NPCs, doors or obstacles. I’ve come up short on my todo list. I dropped hiding NPCs because the test game I was trying to make didn’t have a use case. Obstacles got dropped because walls are the only kind of obstacle I need until I have items. And doors fell by the wayside because how my code represents a map right now makes it hard to do this. Like, the code doesn’t have an idea of what maps should be being displayed at all. This is a problem and finding those kinds of problems is where I am right now in the software development process.
Next week I hope to work on solving this map problem and also add a game mechanic where you can pick up items that are on the map. Also next week, I hope to explain more of the long term plan for the game. My hope is that in explaining it to you, some of you will start to poke holes in the mechanics and help me find ways to improve the game as a whole.
-MCW