I thought I would try something new. Rather than not releasing anything because I never consider anything I do as finished I want to document my next venture as a kind of tutorial. Hopefully it will force me to focus and maybe someone will stumble in here and find something useful.

So to this end I give you you my latest venture. I have rather imaginatively called it the 8bit Game Template.

I have written lots of small unfinished games and I want to make my life easier by writing a small template of code which will hopefully allow me to forget about the low level nitty gritty and allow me to concentrate on writing a game. A bit like the good old days of computing where you can just jump in and learn what the built-in language gave you and you worked within those confines to produce your masterpiece.

To that end I propose the template will implement the following.

  • A pixel ( canvas ) resolution of 320 x 240.
  • Refresh Rate. The canvas will run at up to 30fps max.
  • 16 colours – Fixed
  • Some basic drawing commands for drawing to the screen. Pixel, rectangle, circle.
  • The ability to define images and draw in them with same commands you use to draw in the screen.
  • Sprites – These can be given an image and position and will appear on top of the screen.
  • Collisions – An easy way to check if any two sprites have overlapped.
  • keyboard input – An easy way to check if a key is up or down. Also to see if specific key(s) have just been pressed.
  • mouse input – Not sure about this one. I seem to recall it can get quite processor intensive but I guess you should be able to see inspect the mouse is and whether the left button is clicked or up/down.

Future Enhancements

  • Tiled Background.
  • Scrolling.
  • Screen Layers
  • Sound.

Begin with Part 1

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