Blue Tengu’s Live Game Development Show – Season 2, Episode 22

Blue Tengu's Game Development Show - Room to Room
In this episode of Blue Tengu’s Game Development Show, we move away from individual islands and set up our first room transition because we’re going to need the breathing room to make a giant, explorable world without overflowing the memory on players’ computers.

For the moment, moving from room to room will work better for us, though there is still the possibility that we could arrange for everything to take place in one large room with a little trickery. One technique would be to make sure the player isn’t in sight of any islands or enemies and then warp the player back to a more central location in the room, essentially putting them on a treadmill that scrolls the world into the room. This would at least remove the need for any room transitions and make the whole world a giant, seamless entity (to the player), but obviously it would be a lot of work making it work right.

The other thing we’ll have to do is switch from using ini files to xml files for storing data so that we can actually start storing individual islands. Ini files have a bit of a limitation when it comes to storing nested data, where XML files are designed for that. An ini file would make a poor database stand-in, but an XML file can actually serve as the data in a database, for example. We want to be able to look up, say “island x13y15” and get all of the information we need to spawn that island in. We could, of course, hack that name into the ini file and make it a big mess, but we’d prefer something a little more organized because it’ll make debugging easier when things go wrong – and things always go wrong.

Though we’ll take a break from map-related tasks next week for the Christmas episode, our goal remains to get as much of the mapping and island-generation process done over the New Year’s break as possible so that we can return to focusing on gameplay elements and actual content creation.

Game Development Show Tasks Worked on This Episode:

  • Adjust Room Edge Tiles Based on Room Size
  • Allow the Player to Move to a New Room when the Hit the Edge
  • Shift the View on Room Transition

We also want to give a shout out to viewers Pandabitz and HausOfKlaus. Pandabitz is creating a game in Unreal Engine 4, which HausOfKlaus had a video of, so if you’re interested, check it out here.

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