UMD Game Design Club

1
UMD Game Design Club

• website
• http//www.cis.umassd.edu/u_ddaniels/gdc

2
Goals

• To provide weekly presentation and coverage of
  game design topics.
• To provide a place for meeting people who are
  interested in gaming, so that you can work on
  projects, or just have fun playing games together
  (LAN parties etc.)

3
Game Competition

• The first GDC game competition involves modifying
  an existing 2D platform game to create your own
  unique game.
• You can edit the
• images and tiles used in the game
• edit how the game plays, modify the physics etc.
• You'll be given 3 weeks to complete your game
  project
• (2/17/05 3/8/05).
• You can work in teams or alone on this project.

4
Creating a 2D Platform game

• Platform games are games in which player runs and
  jumps from platform to platform, avoiding bad
  guys and collecting power ups.
• To create a platform game you must learn about
• tile-based maps
• map files
• collision detection
• power-ups
• bad guys
• parallax background scrolling

5
Creating a Tile-Based Map

• A tile-based map is composed of several image
  tiles on a grid.
• Like creating a game with building blocks
• Makes it easy to determine what's solid and
  what's empty on the map.
• See TileMap.java class for details

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Loading Tile Maps

• Tile maps can be stored in text files, which can
  contain characters that represent specific tiles.
• This allows for easy creation and storage of
  levels for your game.
• See TileMap.loadMap() for details.

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Drawing Tile Maps

• Tile Maps are much larger than the screen so only
  a portion is displayed at a time.
• As the player moves the map scrolls to keep the
  player in the center of the screen

8
Drawing Sprites

• After the tiles in view are drawn you'll need to
  draw the other sprites (player, power-ups, bad
  guys).
• Here are some ideas for doing that
• Partition sprites into screen size sections and
  only draw the ones visible. Make sure as sprites
  move they change to the appropriate partition.
• Keep list of sprites in order of horizontal
  location, keep drawing until a sprite is not
  visible then all visible sprites would've been
  drawn.
• Draw every sprite in the current level, every
  refresh.

9
Parallax Scrolling

• Parallax scrolling is the method of scrolling the
  background image at a slower rate than the map
  scrolls so that it appears farther away.
• For example clouds in a game scroll slower than
  the rest of the map.
• Gives a more realistic feel than a static
  background. It gives the game perspective.
• Could use an image for background, or even
  another tile-map to create more flexible and
  custom backgrounds. Or even use transparency to
  do cool effects.

10
Powerups

• Powerups are sprites that when the player hits
  them some event occurs.
• Acquire star, a sound is played.
• Acquire musical note, drum track toggles on/off
• Acquire goal power up, proceed to the next level

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Badguys

• Bad guys are similar to power ups in that actions
  occur when the player interacts with them.
• The major difference is that the bad guys have
  their own movement, and can effect the player,
  just as the player can effect them.
• For example
• Land on bad guy head, bad guy is killed
• run into bad guy horizontally, player is killed,
  restart map.
• Bad guys must have movement patterns so that they
  can patrol the map, either flying up and down, or
  moving left and right until they hit a wall.

12
Collision Detection

• You need to make sure that the player, and bad
  guys can't walk through the walls.
• Detecting tile collision
• see if player or sprite is in the grid location
  of a solid tile, if so correct position.
• Detecting sprite collision
• see if player is ontop of a bad guy, or on
  colliding sideways with a bad guy.
• see if player is on a powerup so that they can
  collect it.
• Check to see if sprite boundary's intersect if so
  then there is a collision and it must be handled.

13
Ideas to Expand The Game

• Better collision detection, and handling.
• Interactive tiles, breakable tiles, open doors,
  adds a puzzle element to the game.
• walk-thru tiles that could allow users to pass
  into a tube or a cave.
• better parallax scrolling, transparent
  backgrounds or multi-parallax images.
• Use different images for different actions, such
  as jumping, dying, collecting power up.
• More destructive environment, falling rocks,
  bottomless pits.
• Better map-to-map transitions create a loading
  screen
• Keep track of powerup collection add a scoring
  element to the game.
• More bad guys, more levels, different images!

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Next week

• Next week we'll discuss
• People's first impressions of the 2D game, and
  some ideas of projects people would be interested
  in doing for the game competition
• Possibly have a workshop going more in depth into
  the actual coding details of the 2D game, and
  providing simple exercises to learn about it.
• Discuss future topics to be covered by the GDC,
  we welcome anyone interested in learning a Game
  Design topic and presenting it to the club.
• Any project ideas people want to discuss that
  they could use help on.
• Any future ideas for the GDC, (LAN parties, ski
  trips, pizza parties, DD nights, anything)