And the quest continues…

Hours: 2

Total:4

If you have mappy, you can download the map @ http://students.umw.edu/~rrill4hf/ it is called level1_2.

As I mentioned in the last post, I am planning on creating two stages for one level. In the first stage the player must go through obstacles and enemies in order to reach a goal object (probably a flag). The second stage will also need the player to reach the goal but instead of reaching the end the player must defeat a boss. I have designed a second stage for the first level of Blobby’s World.

It is still an introductory level like level 1-1 but adds the element of pits where if the player were to fall into one they will lose a life. I have also created a new enemy for the stage besides the chumps from the first. These creatures are called dum-dums:

These bat like enemies have the ability to fly in the air which makes it harder for the player as they can get in the way of Blobby’s jumping from platform to platform. At the conclusion of the level the player must face this yet to be named boss (Any name suggestions?) :

It is an alien plant creature that will move left and right. It was suggested in the last meeting that I have Blobby transform in different levels. My idea now is to have Blobby transform into a shuriken throwing ninja right before the boss battle. He’ll be able to move just like those old side-scrolling ninja games on the NES which I can’t remember the titles to. While I’m on the subject, I think I will have Blobby transform into multiple things which will reference old school games of the 8-bit era of gaming. Characters like Mario, Megaman, etc. I haven’t made a complete list or sprites of these transformations yet. For the next level I think I will have a volcano level. In the volcano stages I can have Blobby be forced to moving forward as the screen continually scrolls to the right while lava chases our hero.

I still have to work on level switching though since my first attempt failed as I mentioned last time where I cleared the previous map after completion and then try to load the second map. What I did was I created a level variable that keeps track of which level the game is on. I initialize this value to 1 in main.c. Within setup.c I have conditional statements for which map to load based on the value of the level variable. level is then updated in environment.c where I increment it at the end of the first stage. When the player collides with the goal I have the gameover function return a 3 to main.c which then causes it to invoke the setup function which I thought would erase the current map and load the second. When I tested the code the game froze and the screen was just blinking. I’m not sure what happened. For the Allegro users, can I get a hint on how to switch levels? Would I just create one bitmap file which contains all the maps for the entire game and just have the specific part of the map displayed on the screen? Any tutorials online? I will be working on level switching tomorrow so perhaps I will be able to resolve this issue with more research.

Source: main.c, game.h, setup.c, input.c, environment.c, cleanup.c