I always wanted to make a Mario Bros. style side scroller. I tried once long ago but I had such a hard time dealing with things like; "how does the player know not to fall through bricks but to fall when he's at the end of them" that I just gave up. Today however, I decided that maybe in my old age, I've acquired the wisdom and patience to accomplish such a feat. The feat will be attempted in Java.
I've also been itchin' to do some programming on my new macbook pro, so I downloaded the latest version of eclipse, slid the icon to the application thingy and blasted out a preliminary engine. Now, this engine is very preliminary, but it's a start.
Basically, the player is a circle which falls under gravity and can stand on square objects (Squobs) which he can't pass through. He (it's a dude) experiences drag and will grind to a halt if you let go of the controls. Also, he can jump.
The code is very simple: The whole thing runs on a thread which:
- calculates his next position
- checks for collisions at this position against a list of squobs
- handles collisions and applies drag
over and over again. The squobs are held in an array-based data structure and at every step they are all check. This isn't terrible efficient and will be fixed in version 2. Also the sqoubs are manually added in the code which is ridiculous.
The next step will be a level editor to efficiently construct obstacle courses built of squobs that will be loaded on the fly. After that, graphics. Then ...
For now, here's a screenshot:
You can run the applet here.
