I’ve decided what little project to develop in Monkey-X.
It is a basic game: you are Flip (a flea) and you need to reach the exit, jumping left and right, collecting some bonus, avoiding enemies. Nothing more, nothing less.
The ‘concept’ is heavy inspired to Bugaboo (the flea) an ‘ancient’ C64/Spectrum game. Of course it’s not a remake (I really don’t like the idea to recreate the ‘same’ game – with even the same graphics… some people indeed like this thing a lot!)
I added (on the paper for the moment :D) some bonus/ideas not present in the original game. The idea is to create
- a simple game
- not stressing
- replayable
I’ve already implemented a simple map and an animated player that can move around a limited area: the collision system seems to work very well (it’s based on AABB collision).
I’ve tried it in HTML5 and FLASH (I installed FlexSDK in 5 minutes… it’s just a question to change a parameter in config.txt and restart the IDE… of course an automatism could help, but nothing impossible to do!)
At the moment all the graphics is a placeholder. I’m still thinking the style: like simple things, a separation between background and platforms, easy to see everything. I’m not a graphics designer of course so I’ll try to ‘take inspiration’ by the games around!
Next steps:
- implementing the jump control (Flip is a flea, he doesn’t move, he simply jumps: I must define direction and power/distance of the jump)
- level design and loading: automatic level design is – at the moment – not in my list as it requires some thinking… and I don’t want the user will be blocked because the algorithm I designed is wrong!
Final things in the to-do-list
- music: I suck – I will searching for a common-creative music
- graphics: I said above something about, but I will finalize it only at the end. I just planned how many animations I need for Flip (jumping, falling, smashing, etc) and some enemies.
See next post!
