Today I wanted to look at another fun topic involving robots and explosions.
For the first round of Rapid Prototyping at FIEA, each team was given an existing intellectual property to work with, chosen at random from a list provided by the students.
I was lucky enough to be on the three-man team that received the topic of Transformers. Our team of programmer, producer, and artist decided to base our game on the fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron from the begining of the 1980s animated move.
On the code side, I actually began using my individual game as a base. I stripped the level down to one platform, added a second player, and bound the 'camera' to the mid-point between them.
As for the actual fighting action, I altered my run-and-gun shooting code to 'shoot' what I called 'punch zones'.
The 'punch zone' class and a sample of the 'punch zone' 'shooting' code can be seen here.
These zones were actually based on the hit-sparks from the previous game. Visual flashes that would vanish within an instant. They were altered to be invisible boxes that would appear in an instant to deliver a blow and then vanish.
This idea of having moves project hit-boxes was one I picked up by over-analyzing M.U.G.E.N. during my spare time in my undergrad years. This is probably fairly standard practice in 2-D fighting games, but I don't think it would have been obvious to me in such a short time had I not spent so much time staring at fighting game debug information.
The two fighters 'shoot' these boxes at certain times during their various attack animations, and the boxes have a variety of properties, such as damage and hit-stun and knock-back.
The system for determining which attack to deal out wasn't terribly elegant, amounting to a series of if statements and arbitrary code numbers, but for a two-week rapid prototype, it allowed us to get in a surprisingly large number of fighting game features.
For the first round of Rapid Prototyping at FIEA, each team was given an existing intellectual property to work with, chosen at random from a list provided by the students.
I was lucky enough to be on the three-man team that received the topic of Transformers. Our team of programmer, producer, and artist decided to base our game on the fight between Optimus Prime and Megatron from the begining of the 1980s animated move.
On the code side, I actually began using my individual game as a base. I stripped the level down to one platform, added a second player, and bound the 'camera' to the mid-point between them.
As for the actual fighting action, I altered my run-and-gun shooting code to 'shoot' what I called 'punch zones'.
The 'punch zone' class and a sample of the 'punch zone' 'shooting' code can be seen here.
These zones were actually based on the hit-sparks from the previous game. Visual flashes that would vanish within an instant. They were altered to be invisible boxes that would appear in an instant to deliver a blow and then vanish.
This idea of having moves project hit-boxes was one I picked up by over-analyzing M.U.G.E.N. during my spare time in my undergrad years. This is probably fairly standard practice in 2-D fighting games, but I don't think it would have been obvious to me in such a short time had I not spent so much time staring at fighting game debug information.
The two fighters 'shoot' these boxes at certain times during their various attack animations, and the boxes have a variety of properties, such as damage and hit-stun and knock-back.
The system for determining which attack to deal out wasn't terribly elegant, amounting to a series of if statements and arbitrary code numbers, but for a two-week rapid prototype, it allowed us to get in a surprisingly large number of fighting game features.
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