TetraCity is a falling blocks and city simulation game. Completing lines in the falling block game earns money which can be used to buy buildings to create a city. Models were created in Blender for the buildings in the game.
When certain conditions are met, the player will unlock new types of buildings for their city. Networking support is enabled to allow multiplayer games, however the interface needs to be improved.
TetraCity builds are available for both Windows and Linux.
Released
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH-Juho6Kqs
Now with doors and level changes.
The latest build now contains many more improvements. I created a Door object, which represents a door which will take the player another level. An array of Doors is contained in the Map object, but I doubt I’ll ever have more than one door on a map. However, I may have multiple doors in a level, and each door will take the player to a different level. A World class has also been created to keep track of all the levels and the current level.
A method to determine if all of the enemies in a level have been defeated has also been added. When the level is cleared of enemies, the message “DEFRAGMENTATION COMPLETE” is displayed. At this time, all doors in the level will be unlocked. For now, this is visually represented by the door changing from red to black. At that time, if the player collides with the door then they will be taken to the next level as determined by the World object.
On the player class, I added a method which translates the player’s screen coordinates to the room coordinates, since calculating that value each time when needed became confusing.
In the enemy class, the binary code for each enemy is now randomly generated. At first, I was getting the same binary code for each enemy, since the Random object was declared as an instance variable for each enemy. To get random codes for each enemy, I had to make the Random object static so it is shared between all of the instances.
One problem that I need to fix is when the player shoots and moves across the room boundary. In that case, the projectile isn’t associated to a room, so warps over to the next room. Additionally, I need to work out the issue with the bock collision when moving across a room boundary, which usually pushes the player back a noticeable amount.
I did some web searches, and found there is already an academic game called Binary Blaster. I’m not sure if that is an official trademark or registered copyright, but I don’t want a legal fight so I am going to change the name since it is still early. Now the working title is Blasting Bits, which was the heading from my previous post. Binary Blaster is catchy, but people could also confuse it with a game called Blaster already on XBLIG. Also, it may be a little too similar to Blaster Master for the NES. I also like the word Blasting in the title, because it is more of an active verb which makes it seem more exciting.
