[DEVLOG] Wilder West (a MicoJS gamejam entry)

Pokitto Programming Dev Logs
1

This is my initial idea (actually suggested by @carbonacat) of the gamejam entry.
The idea is to make the highest cake possible. The mechanics would be a bit like in this:

or this:

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oh - i didplay similar games and liked them a lot

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The cake stacking is a nice idea, but do not feel I am motivated enough to do it. I like a game where there is a main character which you can control. One can always make all kinds of demos of different kind of ideas but to be able to actually finish the game (fix the bugs, implement the ui, etc. i.e the boring stuff), you have to be super motivated. Remember the 80-20 rule ( the last 20% of the features account for 80% of the total implementation effort ).

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if it isn’t fun, it won’t be a good game - so just do what your heart tells you, nothing wrong with that

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Little sparkling rectangles

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what could be made of this…:thinking:

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I have only a vague idea of that. Here is more.

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8

A little progress:

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9

i don’t know what it is, but i think it’s somehow cute :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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Now I have an idea how to use that graphics to make a game:
You are a cowboy taking care of the drove in the prairie. There are many threatening things to poor cows: wolves, thiefs, alien abduction, etc. You have only your colt revolver (6 bullets) which you have to also load time to time.

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Still nice and cosy. Cows are wandering all around, eating grass and cacti (!). I do some exercise to keep up my shooting skills…

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nice idea!

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A screenshot of the current state:
image

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DEVLOG #1

This the first real devlog entry. I have now figured out the theme and the name “Wilder West” (at least for now). But in this devlog I am going to talk about the minimap.

Implementing a minimap

A minimap (or “a radar”) is a minimized view of the game area. It can be used e.g. in the car games to see the whole track profile and the car positions in it. It this game it is used by the player to detect enemies which threaten the cattle. The player sees only a part of the tilemap which contains the whole game area, so it is useful to be able to spot coyotes early. The minimap is located in the bottom right corner and looks like this:

image
image776Ă—621 2.86 KB

The white dot is the player, the brown dots are cows, and the red dot is the coyote.

It is quite easy to implement. Basically, you redraw the objects ( except that e.g. tiles and bullets are skipped) but instead if drawing the character bitmap, you draw a colored dot in the minimap area.
The game object coordinates are divided by 16 to scale them down to fit to the minimap. The size of the minimap (in pixels) is the same as the size of the tilemap (in tiles), so 30x30.

The drawing code is like this:


        // *** Draw the window

        // Draw the white borders
        let topLeftX = screenWidth-mazeW-2;
        let topLeftY = screenHeight-mazeH-2;
        setPen(whiteColor);
        rect(topLeftX-2, topLeftY-2, mazeW+4, mazeH+4);
        
        // Fill with black.
        setPen(blackColor);
        rect(topLeftX, topLeftY, mazeW, mazeH);

        // Draw the active game objects to the minimap.
        for (let ii = 0; ii < numOfGobs; ii++) 
        {
            let o = allObjectArray[ii];
            if(o.isActive)
            {
                // Set the color.
                let o = allObjectArray[ii]; 
                if(o.type=="hero")
                    setPen(whiteColor);
                else if(o.type=="cow")
                    setPen(brownColor);
                else if(o.type=="fox")
                    setPen(redColor); 

                // Draw the dot.               
                let mmx = o.x/mazeTileSize;
                let mmy = o.y/mazeTileSize;
                rect(topLeftX+mmx, topLeftY+mmy, 2, 2);
            }
        }

That’s about the minimap. Next I think I need to check the game with different device modes, how it looks.

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