I am pleased to announce the completion of my first ever DBPro game - it's called "Maxman", and with a name like that, you can pretty much conclude it's a Pac Man clone.
It isn't "pure" Pac Man - it has the eater, the four ghosts, pills and power pills, but as a joke for some colleagues, there are some alternative goodies to replace the fruit.
The game can be downloaded from here :
http://www.skgpl.co.uk/DBPro/Maxman/setup.exe
A few things :
Performance
Although it works great on my own laptop, and the other PC I have around the house, both these PCs are over 1400 mhz so I am not sure how this is going to go on a lower spec PC.
The Mazes
The mazes are made up of a bitmap file representing the maze graphically, and a text file (extension of .maz) which contains the "1s and 0s" for the maze - there are only three different mazes with this version, but they cycle forever.
The AI
The AI is pretty basic - some "homing in" does take place but it isn't tweaked to make it very hard - that said, the randomness of the movement does make it harder than it may sound - I have coded it so the ghosts will never reverse unless in a cul-de-sac situation - which only occurs at the beginning of the game when three of the ghosts are in their cell.
What's with the beer?
Well, I made this for fun, and there's a bloke who I work with who is a little out there - he belches all the time, he lives on Red Bull and carries a can of Lynx around with him - so a lot of the game was dedicated to this guy - or rather the laugh we have at his expense!
But seriously, I wanted this to be "like" Pac Man but have it's own little gimmick - the Carlsberg Special Brew, for example, will not only slow your player down, it will reverse the directions! So it's like having an extra ghost in the maze when this appears making it even more challenging.
The game's level does dictate how often the nice objects appear, like the Lynx can which can be used to reset the ghosts if they back you in a corner, and how often the nasty objects appear (the Special Brew and the Stella Artois).
The Red Bull makes your player super fast - too fast to control in some circumstances in fact!
Collision Detection
Until I get used to DBPro, I have avoided the sprite collision detection as I found it way too slow - but it was perhaps the way I was using it - but that aside, collision detection is based on grids initially, but there is some leway allowing a ghost to be touching the player without a collision being triggered - this allows those close pursuits to occur and the player will be able to turn and not get tagged - but not too close....
Thanks go to..
Cattle Rustler for introducing me to Inno Setup - you was right it is a cracking freebie
Edited to remove typos!
