Platformer #3: Design

Instructions

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Draw Tiles

Tiles are pieces of background images that are drawn at particular places in the room. They do not have associated events nor do they create collision. The good part is that they are fast and use little memory. So you can create large rooms without the need for large images.

Tiles Background

Go into Room 1 …

Go to the tiles tab. Select the tiles background.

If you don’t see this option, save your game and then go to File > Advanced Mode.

Then go to File > Recent Files … to open your game again quickly.

Draw Tiles

Draw tiles by clicking on the appropriate tile and next left-clicking where you want to place them in the room, like you would do for objects.
You can hold SHIFT to keep adding the same tile.
The right mouse button deletes tiles.

Select different pieces of the tile set and place on the room as demonstrated below…

Ground

Grass (and edges)

Columns

Platforms (and edges)

Clouds & Pits

Sky Background

When you’re done, go to the backgrounds tab: change the background to the “sky” picture …

…and turn off the grid to see how it would look when you’re playing the game.

Block Objects

Floors, Platforms, Columns

Go into Room 1 and start by adding the whole block objects to the floor and platforms, and columns.

Platform & Pit Edges

Now add blockR to the left edges and blockL to the right edges of the grass and platforms.

Clouds

Add blockH objects to the clouds…

So it should look like this…

Turn off Grid

If you have all your blocks in, turn off the grid so you can see you didn’t miss any…

So your room should look like this…

Game Objects

Room 1

Add game objects to the room…

character at the bottom-left
mushrooms on floors and each platform
nextLevel on the far right
pits – add over the pit tiles

Room 2

In this room add the same objects:

character
mushrooms
nextLevel
pit
ladder – add over ladder tiles.

Make block invisible

Now that we’re designing a room with graphics, we need to set our main block and horizontal block objects to be invisible.

Go into the death object and the ladder object and make them not visible as well.

Also, move the testing room to the bottom of the list of Rooms so the nice rooms open right away (otherwise you need to hit the ‘N‘ key to skip it).

Test your game

Save and test out your game.

Does it work to move around, jump on platforms, climb ladders, fall into pits, collect mushrooms etc.?

Score Panel

Go into the controller object. Add the Draw event (so the player can see how many lives they have, the score and later if they have ammo).

Score Panel Rectangle

Start by adding the rectangle (fill and outline)…

Set Color: a light color
Draw Rectangle: x1 = 5, y1 = 5, x2 = 80, y2 = 45; filled
this will draw a rectangle filled with the background color X1 & Y1 are where it starts drawing, X2 & Y2 are how wide/high the area is. These are starting values but you can play with them if you want to give your player bonus lives and need more room in the panel.

Set Color: set to black (= the outline color)
Draw Rectangle: same values as previous – can duplicate, but change to “outline” not “filled”.

Draw Lives and Score

Now draw life images and the score.

Draw Life Images: x = 10, y = 10, image = “life”
draw little life sprites to show how many lives the player has
Draw Score: x = 10, y = 25, caption default