Hello everyone, I am a senior at California State University Fresno, and this Fall semester I was enrolled in a beginning game development course that was offered for the first time. For the course project, we were tasked with designing and implementing a game using AppGameKit Tier 2.
This is my game, Inmate:
The game was originally planned to be a Running Man style game where you escaped from a futuristic prison, full of mazes and traps, however, that soon proved to be fairly ambitious and was put on the back burner in favor of the current presentation piece. Inmate, as it is now, takes place in a prison recreation area. Having angered the wrong people, the player must fight to survive a prison brawl. Beating up other inmates as they attack you may net you cigarettes to curb your addiction, and if you're lucky, some first aid supplies to fix your bloodied face.
Working with AppGameKit proved to be no small task, but the many library functions, especially in regards to sprites and physics, were invaluable to a programmer who has never programmed a game in his life. Indeed, game programming is much different than what I've been used to. The whole process was mostly enjoyable, though there were a handful of headaches that went along with my implementation.
Unfortunately, as hard as I tried, my player animation was glitchy at best and non-functional at worst. Enemy AI was much more difficult than I first believed, having seen a simple example in our textbook, but I was pleased with how it turned out. I would have liked to see a function that would move a sprite forward based on its angle, which seems to be a standard function in Dark Basic Pro. Other than that, sprite, sound, and physics functions were fantastic, and were well documented. Altogether a great game engine, and a fun experience!
