The main thing we had not implemented in the game so far was enemy interaction. This posed several problems as GameMaker does not do AI or complex collision detection very well. As a compromise, we simplified the fighting by just giving the enemy a 1 in 3 chance of causing damage to the prince when a collision occurred, while the prince had a 100% collision success rate & needed to land 3 hits to kill the enemy.
To make life easier, Fabrizio broke the development of enemy interaction up into two stages. Firstly he would create a static enemy object to test the collision detection & enemy life system. Once he had this working he implemented the enemy movements & animations based on proximity to the prince. Simple in theory but considerably harder in practice!
A major drawback to this process was the fact that we could only find enemy sprites from the original 1989 game, not the 1992 version we were creating. This meant that the enemy sprites were a completely different size to the prince, making the prince look like some kind of giant! This is where my Photoshop skills came to the rescue! I simply scaled the original sprites up to match the prince & did some pixel-by-pixel tweaking to make sure they didn’t look fuzzy or out of sync with the resolution of the rest of the game. See original & my tweaked version below:
We continued adding sounds, any missing animations & Fabrizio developed a basic HUD to display lives & a help screen to display the game controls. The game was actually starting to feel like a game now!
I began development of a 2nd level at this stage. I decided to take the 1st level from the original 1989 game & alter it slightly so it would serve as a 2nd level in our game! This time around, the creation of the level was much quicker as I really knew what I was doing now! The colour palette & scale between the two games was different so it required some intricate cutting, pasting & tweaking to make the levels match. Also, as we had removed some of the functionality of the prince (mainly the ability to hang from ledges), we had to tweak the logic & layout of the level a little compared to the original. See original & altered level layouts below:
Below is the link to Build 6. The HUD & static enemy with working collision detection are the only major changes for this build.
Build 7 added the enemy movements & some almost imperceptible but important bug fixes. See link below:
At this point we were told to stop adding content & finish up anything of major importance. Our focus now was to push the promotion of the game as far as possible & reach those 200 Facebook page likes! So, for Build 8 we just threw in the finished 2nd level but more than doubled the size & length of the game in the process! Find the link to the last build below!
Next up: conclusions & lessons learned!
Marc O Donoghue 