Not Frogger

[kevin]

This is inspired by an old Konami game from 1981, which I spent far too long playing at the time.
It has really simple gameplay - guide the frog over the busy road without getting hit by the cars, and over the river without drowning in the water (these types of frog couldn't swim in 1981 apparently). The frogs must end up in each of the 5 water areas at the top of the screen. You can step onto crocodiles bodies, but not onto thier mouths. A snake will appear unexpectedly on a log, and if you are standing on its mout h, you will lose a life. You can step onto turtles when they are above the water and fully visible, but have to step off them when they start to dive.
There are 3 levels of increasing difficulty, and movement is by the arrow keys, or A,W,S, and D.
   

  Frogger.zip (Size: 1,000.56 KB / Downloads: 13)

[johnno56]

Well... My first attempt... Actually made it through the first level... I know! Amazing, right? Lost a couple of lives *sigh*... I was expecting an obvious "squish" but that trombone blast was SO much more disheartening... loved it! lol

This is a VERY cool game... Well done!

I am going to apply some basic logic... Because your main folder is entitled, "tilemap version - complete", can I assume that you have or are in the process of completing or have completed, a "non tilemap" version?

Ok. For those of us... oh, alright... me... who have no or little idea as to how you put all this together... perhaps a brief note or two on how you came up with the idea for the N7 version... or perhaps is was a conversion... and the list goes on... Just a few words to inspire or encourage, those of us with but meagre talents, to strive to to do better... I eagerly await for the crumbs of knowledge to fall from your table...

[1micha.elok]

I love frogger. I just nailed level 1 and I'm moving on to Level 2 ... Yes !
Great work, Kevin ! This is already a standout Naalaa project !

   
click the image to zoom in

[Marcus]

This was super fun! But I only made it to level 2, and that's after like five attempts   Well done!

[kevin]

Thank you all for trying the game, and for your kind words.

Johnno - this does use the Tilemap library, but only in a small way. I actually started to make the game without the Tilemap library, by drawing the play area. A basic requirement was that everything needed to be designed as a factor of 16 - the frog movements, the width of each lane in the road and water, and so on. I tried to do this in both Gimp, and my preferred editor - Piskel. However, my drawing skills are pretty limited, and I was making a bit of a mess of the task. So it occurred to me that it would be a lot easier to use the Tilemap editor to do this.

So, I abandoned my previous effort, and went the Tilemap way. Now that I have completed it, I am looking at recoding it without the Tilemap library, using an isometric view - quite likely that will never see the light of day however (like most of my projects).

None of the tiles are classed as obstacles, so the game could have probably been coded quite easily without needing to use the Tilemap library. I just wanted to make a version of the game, as I remembered it, so there are probably features missing.

The game itself is quite simple compared to newer games. It's really just navigating 2 types of "obstacle" - the cars, and the water features. Both of these are held in a separate table for each (created in the "initiate_level()" function), and then each cycle, the frogs position is tested for collision against each of the objects in the tables - I used TM_SpritesCollide(), but a simple rectangle/rectangle collision test would work just as well.

All the best - Kevin.

[johnno56]

Thank you. I do so enjoy "the classics" and jump at the chance to recreate them. Unfortunately, my reach usually far exceeds my grasp, which is why a lot of my projects are relegated to the "phantom zone"...

Yes. I noticed the use of Tilemap but wasn't sure how it was used. I will go through your code, yet again, to see what I can pick up.

I have always used pencil and paper to draw "the map" then convert each "tile" to a character and store each line of characters in an external file. Reading the file to then "create" the scene... Such a lengthy process... Tilemap is so much easier to create the map. Its the use of the correct commands that confuses me the most. But that will come with time and practice.

What inspired you to choose Frogger? How did you go about setting it up? Because I have no formal training in GameDev, I really struggle to work out these two basic steps... I can follow tutorials and reproduce the example but coming up with new ideas , without the constant fear of re-inventing the wheel, is really difficult. At the moment I learn by tinkering (trial and error... mostly error), tutorials and questions....

It's 2130, here in Melbourne, and I either need some sleep, a new brain or some coffee... I think I will go with coffee then look at your listing...

[kevin]

Thank you. I do so enjoy "the classics" and jump at the chance to recreate them. Unfortunately, my reach usually far exceeds my grasp, which is why a lot of my projects are relegated to the "phantom zone"...

Yes. I noticed the use of Tilemap but wasn't sure how it was used. I will go through your code, yet again, to see what I can pick up.

I have always used pencil and paper to draw "the map" then convert each "tile" to a character and store each line of characters in an external file. Reading the file to then "create" the scene... Such a lengthy process... Tilemap is so much easier to create the map. Its the use of the correct commands that confuses me the most. But that will come with time and practice.

What inspired you to choose Frogger? How did you go about setting it up? Because I have no formal training in GameDev, I really struggle to work out these two basic steps... I can follow tutorials and reproduce the example but coming up with new ideas , without the constant fear of re-inventing the wheel, is really difficult. At the moment I learn by tinkering (trial and error... mostly error), tutorials and questions....

It's 2130, here in Melbourne, and I either need some sleep, a new brain or some coffee... I think I will go with coffee then look at your listing...

I'm sure that everyone has a different approach to preparing to write a game, but for what it's worth, here is what i do.

I spend some leisure time watching Youtube videos of all sorts of games, mainly from the DOS era, as for me, this was the time when the gameplay was the most important aspect of a game, which is what I prefer. I may identify a particular action, or period in the game, where I think I understand how something is working, and if it interests me, I will try to reproduce it in N7. I won't use any fancy graphics for this - perhaps just shapes. This may be as far as I go with this particular exercise, but if I manage to reproduce the action in the game, I feel a sense of satisfaction. If I am very happy with the result, I may save it for use in a later project.

In the case of Frogger for example, I started by identifying the need to have tables for the road and water objects. I then wrote some quick code to see if I could produce the cars (rectangles) moving in different directions, and the frog(another rectangle) hopping between the cars. Then I repeated this for the water objects, to see if I could jump from one object to another. Once I had the mechanics for these 2 things working to my satisfaction, I felt that I had the basis for a working game, and spent some time on producing some better graphics for it. I will usually leave things like scoring, levels, introduction screens. and so on, until last - most of my projects don't get to that stage.

I'm not worried about "re-inventing the wheel" personally, and will shamelessly re-code old classics for my own satisfaction. I think I gain more satisfaction from coding the games, than I do from playing them. I will sometimes try to code something from my own imagination, but I too find it hard to come up with new ideas - they are much more likely to be an amalgamation of ideas from different games from times gone by (often using code snippets that I have saved in the past, as described in the second paragraph).

Hope this helps in some small way....