Explorer

Where do I start?

I’m going to break this one down a little more hierarchically

Make sprites sPlayer, sGrid, sFlag and sWall
Make objects oPlayer, oFlag, and oWall
Make player move 1 grid space at a time in response to key presses
Center view on player
Trigger next room when oPlayer collides with oFlag
Make oPlayer stop when collides with oWall

Make sprites sCoin, and object oCoin
Increase coin count when oPlayer and oCoin collide (and also destroy the coin)
Draw the coin count to the GUI

Make sprites sKey1, sKey1Icon, sKey2, sKey2Icon, sLock1, and sLock2
Make objects oKey1, oKey2, oLock1, and oLock2
Set booleans whenever oPlayer collides with any of the keys
Make the locks solid, unless the player has the correct key
Destroy locks when player collides with them (if we use the solid feature, this should only be possible when the player has the correct key)
Draw the key icons for the player

Make sprites sFlippers, sWater, sSkates, sIce
Make objects oFlippers, oWater, oSkates, oIce
The reset is essentially the same as with lock & key, except the terrain/shoes don’t get destroyed when they’re used

How do I keep the player above the terrain?

The order that objects are drawn is determined by the room layers. In my case I put the player on it’s own layer above all the other objects to make sure it was never behind anything

Sometimes you get lucky, and it shows up above everything anyway, but using layers is probably a good habit anyway

How do I make the walls stop the player?

This is actually kind of tricky. I haven’t gone over it in the course, but I did touch on it in the Jumper FAQ. I’ll rehash it here

The easiest way to do add walls and leverage the solid property. When you mark an object as solid, that means that other objects can’t overlap when they collide with it. Emphasis on the when they collide! So if we create an oWall object which we put along the edges of the screen, and we don’t want the player to stop when it hits it, we need to mark oWall as solid AND make a collision event in oPlayer. The collision event doesn’t need to have any code, but the event still needs to exist (it’s weird, I know)

I’m not a big fan of this method, it feels really weird. We’ll go over better approaches for the next game

How to I make `sGrid` tile on the background?

I just set sGrid as the background sprite in the background layer

If you do that and check the boxes for “Horizontal Tile” as well as “Vertical Tile” you should be golden

Do I need `oControl` in this one?

In Flappy Bird we used oControl to manage variables that were persistent across the levels. In this case I want the coins to be persistent, but not the item flags (players will need to rediscover the items for every puzzle)

So I do recommend using oControl for the coins, but not for the item flags

As a result I ended up with Draw GUI events in both oControl and oPlayer so I just needed to be careful that the coin text and the flag icons didn’t overlap

Where can I learn move about designing levels like these?

This idea was inspired by Chip’s Challenge (it was nostalgic for me, not sure how many people share this). I featured some of the easier mechanics here, but there’s a lot more to choose from it you want a challenge 😉😉

Also, in Mark Brown’s videos analyzing the Zelda games, he came up with a diagraming method to communicate the lock/key flow in Zelda. You can actually break our levels into those same diagrams, so it could be a good thing to try

popper ideas