As I continue my game development education I've come across a few articles or lectures like this one discussing the power pac-man had on game development- since I'm a nooB I figured I should try to recreate the game mechanics of Pac-man in 3d for practice- I was able to recreate the major game mechanics of Pac-man except for the warp zones with my newest game Experiment HAc-man which you can play here
The goal of the game like Pac-man is to get all the pellets- which are eyeballs in this case before the ghosts which are monsters can kill you- In Pac-man you die on contact with the enemy- I decided to give the player 3 hearts of life though- Also in place of the power pellets I used red axe's
The simple enemy AI to simulate the ghosts in pac-man consisted of only two states "Chase" and "Flee" I used an integer variable so that when the variable was 0 they chased the player and when it was set to 1 they ran and hid- When the player gets the axe it changes the variable to 1 and then a timer runs and when it runs out it switches it back to 0.
It took me a day or two and was pretty fun to work on except I couldn't get the baby bombs to kill the enemies with a proper proximity effect- I just set it to kill them all- I'll have to figure that out later-
Now that I tried to recreate the Pac-man mechanics I'll move onto to trying to do the mechanics for some other old games like Donkey Kong, Frogger, and maybe Pitfall- So I'll probably kick out like 5 more tests/learning projects disguised as "games" THEN I'll get serious and try to make some awesome epic shit!
They say you have to make ten shitty games before you can make something good- this is my 5th one- so five more to go!
Wow man. Seriously. Fuck you for being so talented. You've been making games for, what, three weeks, and this is already where you're at?
ReplyDeleteBastard.
Cool game, though. I can definitely see the direction you're heading.
You should check out Jessie Schell's "The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses". Best book on design you'll ever read.
Its not that hard to do it today with the right tools like the ones I'm using you could do it too!
ReplyDeleteYeah that was one of the two design books I bought and have studied- really good stuff- also gamasutra has posted some cool articles analyzing level and enemy design in old 8 bit games- I find studying those is the best way to learn for me- and we gotta talk games soon!
Oh yeah, I've read those articles. The ones that broke down movement patterns and such into a bunch of broad categories. Good stuff.
ReplyDeleteAs for the latter -- most def!