Chapter 10. Designing a simple platformer
It’s a beautiful summer day, not a cloud in the sky, which makes it the perfect time for a beach trip. But Buffy finds a mess when she finally gets on the sand. There are ditches filled with water, snapping crabs, and to top it off, some kid has left a city of sandcastles behind that makes walking impossible, as you can see in figure 10.1. There’s a better patch of sand about a mile away, but how is she going to navigate that mile?
Figure 10.1. A game of Beach Blast requires three variations on the same backdrop, plus Beachy Buffy, a crab, a sandcastle, a vine, and two sideways barrier lines.
Beach Blast is a side-scrolling platformer like Activision’s 1982 game Pitfall. Pitfall follows the adventures of Pitfall Harry as he leaps over scorpions, sails over tar pits, and dodges rolling barrels. Beach Blast takes the mechanics of Pitfall but sets the jumping and swinging on the beach, making the obstacles water, crabs, and sandcastles.
To draw those obstacles, you’re going to learn an important art concept that you can use to tackle any problem in life: taking a large object and breaking it down into smaller parts.
In this chapter, you will learn
- How to look for basic shapes within an object
- How to break down a unique shape into smaller parts using the grid method to copy an object
- How to look at an image in segments