It's based on Pac Man but instead of a chomping yellow circle I'm going to swap it for a robber and instead of ghosts I'm going to have cops. So I have (rather imaginatively) called the game Cops & Robbers [wink].
There will be a few differences from Pac Man other than just artwork. First, the idea of the game is to see how long the player can survive for (so I will need to brush up on my timer knowledge). Second, the level is going to be bigger than one screen (to get experience dealing with conditional scrolling). And third, the powerup is a cannon that will constantly fire once collected and when one cop is destroyed, two will be respawned (possibly with speed increases) to increase the difficulty.
I already have a very basic level editor working that can scroll through tiles, place tiles, save and load. However, I will need to iron out a couple of problems if I release it (it's not very easy to use so it may not be worth releasing [rolleyes]).
As for the game itself, I have first gone through and made a rough plan of the parts that I'm unsure how to make (e.g. Enemy AI) and the classes I will need. I also have a step-by-step plan of how I'm going to build the game:
1) Basic set-up (SDL, FMOD etc) with all five gamestates. Just pressing enter goes through each one. (i.e. Intro-->Title-->Level-->High Score-->Game Over-->Quit)
2) Implement a menu so that Title can go to Level or High Score and also Level will ask the player if they want to quit before going back to Title.
3) Load and display the level (should be trivial as already done this for the level editor)
4) Timers (i.e. displaying the player's survival time). This will also need a font.
5) Player Movement with collision detection
6) Cannon (ie. firing and placing on the level)
7) Enemy AI (inc. going to Game Over and collision with bullets)
8) High Scores (implemented in Escape From Space-Prison Lambda so should be easy to add)
9) Polish
Now I'm going through making more detailed plans for each step. So far I've planned steps 1-3 but future steps will need substeps. So I've got a lot to do before I touch any more code...
Thanks for reading
Any comments?
-AEdmonds
