Game Prototype Im Starting ... dots

flattspott · Post by **flattspott** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 3:56 pm

After seeing JEK and his Connect game is was inspired to make my own game, not a clone of an existing game. Mind you all, I have just started to code this and the below image is only a prototype mockup done in photoshop.

And yes it is based on the pen and paper game.

the-dan · Post by **the-dan** » Sat Sep 17, 2005 6:31 pm

great to hear! i've spent many an hour in classrooms playing this game instead of listening! i love it!

Shine · Post by **Shine** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 12:46 am

Nice game, in Germany it is known as Käsekästchen (cheese box) and I've played it some 20 years ago, too, in boring French lessons in school.

Thanks for the graphics, a first implementation: http://www.luaplayer.org/dots.zip
I thought I could finish it faster, but I needed really 4 hours for it. Looks like I must learn some more Lua :-)

LuMo · Post by **LuMo** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 2:35 am

@shine, thats evil *ROFL*
he prepares to wirte a game (guess most of us take lot more time to code&rewrite non-working code ;) ) and you finish it within 4hours *lol*
nice game btw, knew it from geography :D
@flattspott, get up with the next idea

greets Lumo

flattspott · Post by **flattspott** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 2:37 am

Hey you werent spose to to do it for me.

I got my own way that i am gonna try, using a array structure like grid[y][x].value, where i is from 1 to 4 representing four screens to draw on, one for the top, bottom, left and right lines.

The point being I can use transparent pngs, for each line section and stack them up creating the illusion that it is one image like a 3-sided box made of lines.

It's probably complex for such a simple game but it was my idea of how to get the job done.

Shine · Post by **Shine** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 4:12 am

flattspott wrote:Hey you werent spose to to do it for me.

Sorry, I couldn't resist, it was just something to relax from my Java and C coding (not PSP related) last week, feel free to ignore it and write your own implementation.

flattspott wrote: I got my own way that i am gonna try, using a array structure like grid[y][x].value, where i is from 1 to 4 representing four screens to draw on, one for the top, bottom, left and right lines.

This could be difficult, because with this concept you have redundancy in your structure (grid[top][2][1] is the same as grid[bottom][1][1]). And you have to be careful when to draw the images, because I think drawing all these images in one VSync is not possible. But you can draw only the changed parts to an offscreen image, like in my implementation. Or you can ignore speed issues, because it is not an action game and if drawing needs more than 1 VSync, it is ok, but then you have to do your own tricky synchronization with clock() for smooth color animations like the cursor in my implemenation.

flattspott wrote:It's probably complex for such a simple game but it was my idea of how to get the job done.

You are right, it is too complex, if you don't plan to use special images for the borders instead of plain lines and even then I think there are easier solutions.

BTW: my solution is too complex, too. I think 2 arrays are enough: one for the startup configuration field and one for the in-game field. Then you could remove the hBorders and vBorders arrays, which took me the most time not to mixup the coordinates :-)

Another good idea for the game: use two cursors, one for each player. This helps when the players want to build boxes at far away positions from each other.

Wraggster · Post by **Wraggster** » Sun Sep 18, 2005 11:19 pm

Sandy Sung emailed me a release of your game converted to run on DJSP http://psp-news.dcemu.co.uk/djdots.shtml

Nice work:)