torstai 9. toukokuuta 2013

Adventure games and the design bit

Good evening, readers! I was asked to write more about my game in the Shiver Me Timbers dev blog, so here is an update for you.

Shiver Me Timbers has been in something of a stand still lately. Even though all the important code for the game is in place, it will still take a lot of time and effort to create all the rooms for the game. The room editor makes this slightly easier, but only slightly. I still have to go through many steps to create each room and make sure that they take up as little memory as possible. There are also some other things that must be manually tweaked for each room.

Also, Shiver Me Timbers is not the only project to which I've devoted my time. I've been coding some other things as well. One of them is a PC program which will take many months to complete, due to the number of features that it will have.
But that's another story. I might write more about it in an another blog. Today's subject is the room loader of my game.


Room data in adventure games

For Shiver Me Timbers, I was initially going to use 4 x 4 tiles. The nice thing with tiles is that each room has a fixed filesize, and a tile room takes up fairly little memory. Tiles themselves contain so many characters that only a few tiles (And therefore, only a few bytes) are needed to build a room.

However, I quite quickly realised that the tile system probably wouldn't be very useful for SMT. The graphics will have so much variety that with the tile method, I would surely need easily more than 256 tiles.

The next option that popped up to my mind, is compression. And that is exactly what I'm currently using in SMT. So, with this method the room is built onto the screen with groups of 3 bytes. The bytes mean the following:

1st: How many
2nd: Colour
3rd: Char

This means that every room has a different filesize. A really simple room with lots of repeating characters with one colour would take up very little space, while a more detailed room would naturally take up more space.

For example, if we had a room which consists of nothing but white char 1's, it would look like this in memory:

FF 01 01 FF 01 01 62 01 01

Each room is 32 x 19 chars =  608 chars. Or 0x260 chars... I always prefer hex! ;)

0xFF + 0xFF + 0x62 =  0x260


All right, I can't think of anything more to say, so I'll end today's blog here. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for possible updates! Ciao!