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Game developer/programmer living in the UK

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"Triangle"

ryanpridgeon Blog

I’ve recently been working on my new “Triangle” project, which is a work-in-progress name until I can think of something better. It’s a top down adventure style game set in a tile based world inhabited by geometric shape people. In this world, you play the role of a triangle who’s either imprisoned or working his way through some kind of facility/enemy base.

So far I’ve made it to the top of Screenshotsaturday on Reddit one weekend, and gotten a lot of positive feedback, so thanks to everyone supporting the project!

I spent a lot of time developing a shadow/field of view projection algorithm, which lets you only see the parts of the level that are within eyesight of your character. It draws a nice smooth vector shadow over anything that’s not visible, for example around a corner.

I’ve developed a level editor too. I originally started this just so that I could develop the levels for the game, but it’s pretty nice so I might include it with the game. You can draw 3 layers of tile graphics, and also add objects, which you can add from a preset with a button (such as “door” or “enemy1″) or write in XML. The level editor then converts the XML into my own internal level data represented in the engine. The user can save and load the levels from a Base64 string, which is made by converting the level data into a packed byte array, compressing it, then Base64 encoding it. And back again to load. At any point the level can be played.

I’ve been doing all the code and art myself, but so far it’s only taken about 3 weeks. Hopefully I’ll have it ready to play soon enough, but university sure is taking its toll.Thanks for reading, if you wanna check out more, here’s some links to dev threads and such.

Dev thread on Elysian Shadows
Dev thread on TIGSource
Screenshot Saturday post on Reddit