The Greatest Adventurer (TGA)

Project 12

Caracteristics

Description

At the same time as making Cowboy vs. Zombie, I discovered another game that IronPowerTGA had made during a Game Jam, TGA, a challenging but very enjoyable platform game. When we got tired of coding on CVZ2, we thought about how to improve TGA classic. We had a moment to think about the story of the game, to make a lore and how to develop it. My role in this project was to redesign the tiles of the game, the arts, from an 8bits aspect to 16. I became a lot better at drawing the tiles scenery even if, in the current version, most of my drawings have been replaced by those of a real graphic designer.

I also worked a lot on the map converter and the tileset. To design a level, we used Tiled software. It allows to create a tile palette, tileset, tilesheet. The game used its own syntax to load the data of a map or to save the player's progress. So I had to develop a utility software to translate the files from the Tiled format to this custom format. I used the graphic library WinForm provided by microsoft, it uses its own c# language. WinForm is very convenient for all applications which are intended for office automation. Here the application has a very simple aspect but it's a big internal drumroll to translate the files. I also added for a better user experience (and for a significant time saving) a user backup of the last imported file. This makes it easy to fetch resources that are logically a folder or two away.

IronPowerTGA coded a big part of the game, I helped to code some of the player moves. To adapt it to the movements of the old game, and to add little tricks to make the gameplay more pleasant. For example, a very small time where the player can still jump after falling, or a wall detection a little bit bigger than the player's visual collision to perform a wall jump. After I finished setting the character's movement values, I made the system to display the correct character animation.

As the game lacked content, I created some maps. I tried to base them on a gameplay mecanic or a theme. After 3 months of development we stopped the project, we freeze it because we had no longger inspiration to know what to add to the game.

Visuals (Click on one pick to enlarge it)

Game home. Keyboard settings. Tutorial zone. Save zone in a level. Abandonned mine level. Level with arrows. Tiled software. Map conversion software.

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