Phase I

I think that most who purchased a new copy of TGB would very much want to familiarise themselves with what they have bought. Well, there are of course the requisite official tutorials as well as a handful more available on TDN. The resourceful ones would take a look at some of the free source code released in the forum.

But frankly once those have been looked through, you may ask what's next?

For me, the next logical step was to write a clone of an existing retro game. And in this case, I took up the challenge to implement a Pacman clone. I decided to christen the name of my second project "Boxy". Why Boxy? Well, the Pacman I drew using TileStudio purposely employed the Round Rectangle tool - making Pacman really look boxy. The development of Boxy took about 1 day of coding (300+ lines of torquescript to perfect, optimize and to drop dead code), plus another 1 - 2 hours dabbling with Tilestudio, Fraps, and VirtualDub to create a movie for all to see.

You can see Boxy in action below. Boxy is able to traverse down curving passageways without me requiring to press any keys. The only time Boxy stops his movement is when he reaches a T-junction. A problem with Boxy is that he practically "vacuums" all the dots in his path before they enter his mouth - that's a result of implementing a collision on a square block.

All in, I'd say the result I achieved is truly quite hilarious!



Some lessons I like to share with you:

1. Expand on what you learnt (from the tutorials/TDN/etc.) by applying it to your game.

2. Place comments aplenty and try to adopt a coding standard (refer to TDN for suggestions on Best Practices).

3. Search the forums for prior help (surely someone out there had thought about writing a pacman clone).

4. Really ask for help after exhausting all avenues (see #3 above) OR read the TGB engine source code to see what is happening under the hood - the documentation is not always that clear.

5. Tile-laying is very useful for TGB games (I hope this is improved upon for the next generation of T2D, eg. no world coordinates for a tile - except through a forum article). And, I didn't use the .moveto method as suggested in the forums, hence you may notice some "clamping" of Boxy occuring at junctions.

6. Research about the subject matter... in this case, there is a ton of information and inspiration out there on pacman and its variations.

7. And if you write a blog, try to add a screenshot or movie... it really helps!

As you can see, Boxy is quite lonely in the game for now. The next step of course is to add in Ghost clones (I mean none other than the infamous quartet - Inky, Blinky, Pinky, and Clyde) and some background music and sound effects.

Phase II

Hi again, I just spent about an hour looking around and drawing Ghosts! And, I also drew out a pair of eyes for them. Incidentally I have nicknamed my Ghost clones Binky, Plinky, Winky, and Slyde. As you can see in the second video, the Ghosts aren't moving yet, but I think Boxy feels like somebody's watching him... "and there ain't no privacy". Look at the eyes carefully and see how they follow the movement of Boxy around the maze. This is achieved by a simple call to the .setlinkpoint method to offset the ghosts eyes. The eyes are mounted on the Ghosts.



My wife did ask me, "Would I ever release Boxy?"

Well with a great big laugh, definitely not commercially... it's TRULY just a learning exercise.

Phase III

I just spent about 4 hours trying to figure out how to get the ghosts to use the "mysterious" AStar code. Why is it mysterious? Well, there's not much in terms of documentation for it (both in TDN and the tutorials - other than the obvious AStarDemo).

After much tinkering, I got all the ghosts to chase Boxy around the maze. Take a look at the video below.



Getting to use the AStar pathfinding routines was not too difficult. I made some minor tweaks to give Binky, Plinky, Winky, and Slyde some character. For example, Binky will move around the maze the fastest and decide to switchback more often based on where Boxy is, while Slyde would once in a while follow where Binky is heading, etc.

Incidentally, if you were wondering, well your eyes weren't fooling you - Boxy was not killed when he collided with the ghosts - that was intentional. I will implement the "death" of Boxy next time.

Phase IV

The final part is to implement the superdot (or also known as "power pellets" in the original Pacman game). When a superdot is eaten, the ghosts hightail it out of the vicinity of Boxy. Implementing this was a simple exercise after I had finished implementing the hardest part above (in Phase III).

I have also released a tutorial for Boxy over at TDN. And you will find a link to the source files and artwork over there. Have fun and share any feedback or queries in this blog.