Game idea.

[alexransome]

Hi,

I'm new to LiveCode and the programming world. What I've read about LiveCode so far has enabled me to understand other languages, such as Applescript. Just understanding the intent of the code has opened it all up.

So why the post?

I have had an idea for a game, I had the idea some 15 years ago, so it's not new or anything fancy. The concept is that the gamer controls a stickman (my art skills are THAT good) and the stickman is able to go around an area and shoot enemies.

I'd like to know if LiveCode can do this, I suspect it can, but I'm concerned about how much and how many "add-ons" I'll need and if so which ones.

I was thinking to do this in an isometric view, with simple colours (256).

Thanks for your thoughts.

[DarScott]

I saw a nice stickman game once. Flash maybe. It had a 2D side view. It had a nice flow to it. And the motions seemed to match the music. I'm not sure what an isometric view for a stickman would be like--Lego? Or just drawn in four or eight views? Maybe I am making the wrong assumptions about what a stickman is.

With kids I sometimes make a walking man. This uses repeated changes to polygons. I also do balls that bounce off of walls, which uses moves.

Since you mentioned isometric, perhaps you are thinking of tiles. Don't worry about colors at first. Since you are new to programming, you might want to try a simple rectangular tile at first. And make your initial tiles very simple, because you will want to change style or really go to isometric later. Start out with tiles fixed on the screen and then think about a moving view in a world.

[alexransome]

You just reminded me if another idea I had ... Would I need to buy 3rd party stuff to develop some thing like "paper toss" from the Apple App Store.

Which involves a spherical object being thrown away from the user and if course getting smaller and then going some basic bounce effect?

[Simon]

Hi Alex,
Here is a great resource for motion stuff:
http://tactilemedia.com/
In the Software>LiveCode Tutorials section are some great collision detection samples. I don't think any of them use Animation Engine just the LC package that you download.

Now, Animation Engine makes animating things easier. http://livecode.com/store/marketplace/
But for you just to do simple stuff LC can do it.

Paper Toss... I guess it's "move" and "set the rect" to get it to move and shrink.

Simon

[alexransome]

So LiveCode, as downloaded, can do most of the things Animation Engine does. It's just that Animation Engine does them quicker.

This "quicker" is done by having pre-made code to achieve an outcome and do you just tweak the code to suit your needs?

[SparkOut]

Emphasis easier rather than quicker. I'm not sure what the relevant application speed would be, but yes, quicker to script, certainly. You can do some very sophisticated things in two or three lines, instead of making a whole bespoke script yourself. It's not just "pre-made code" that you tweak, it's a library of functions and commands to handle the headache of trying to code all sorts of things - collision detection, constraining objects to stay within certain areas or on specific paths or angles, etc. It doesn't do anything you couldn't do yourself in LC - it is written in LC, of course. But Malte wrote it, and that means it is brilliant.

[andrewferguson]

Hi,
One of the stretch goals that was met during the kickstarter campaign was support for the Box2D physics engine. This might help with your game, but is not available yet. It should be available late 2013 or early 2014.
Andrew

[Uli Kusterer]

The concept is that the gamer controls a stickman (my art skills are THAT good) and the stickman is able to go around an area and shoot enemies. (...)

I was thinking to do this in an isometric view, with simple colours (256).

One way to do this would be to create a button grid and set the icons on the various buttons. Name the buttons in the first row "1,1", "1,2", "1,3" etc., the ones on the second row "2,1", "2,2", "2,3", and so on...

Now when e.g. the player moves, you just remember the name of the button it currently is on, and then set that button's icon to none, and add/subtract from one of the "items" of the button name to calculate what button it should go to, then set the icon of that to the player. This will at first look very choppy, but you could later create several icons that you flip through to get an animation, e.g. that of the stick man walking out the right edge of the icon, and another where it walks in from the left, and then flip through the icons one by one on the current location, then flip through the icons in the new location, making it appear as if it had walked over.

The nice thing about this is that it's easy to do walls and obstacles. Just check the icon of the destination, and if it is a "wall" icon", flip through an animation of your stick man runs against the wall instead.

For isometric 3D, you'd make the buttons overlap slightly in the upper left, and then just take advantage of the support for transparency in icons.