hcalex1/level-designer

Square by Square Level Designer

Definitions:

• character: The player's character though which he interacts with the game world
• tile: Any space the character can occupy.
• position: The reference system for location in 2D. It is chracterized two integers (x, y).
• link: tile1 is linked to tile2 when the character can move from that tile1 to the tile2.
• adjacent: Two tiles are adjacent when they are at a distance of 1. This limits adjacency to tiles in cardinal directions of eachother.
• room: The Interactive occupying a tile with which a character can interact.

Assumptions:

1. tiles can only be linked to adjacent tiles
2. adjacent tiles are by default not linked
3. links will be bidirectional for simplicity.
4. a position can only be occupied by one tile during the game

Reference system:

• positions are represented by two integers and are used as std::pair<int, int>.
• NORTH is the direction represented by the vector ( 0, 1)
• EAST is the direction represented by the vector ( 1, 0)
• SOUTH is the direction represented by the vector ( 0,-1)
• WEST is the direction represented by the vector (-1, 0)

Structure

Level creation and loading will be seperate from the game. All the optimisation and rule/assumption enforcement and validation should be completed during level creation and loading. This allows for faster navigation and room loading. For the mapping system, we can think of Map as a specialized 2D container, of Navigator as the iterator for this 2D container and Tile as a node in the container.

The Tile class

The Tile contains all the information necessary to navigate the map. This information is quickly accessible and does not require much computation.

This information includes:

• pointers to adjacent tiles
• wether or not the tile are linked

Link are tracked in a bitmap.

The Map class

The Map allows the level designer to set adjacency in a consistent manner respecting assumptions above. It stores all the tiles by their position. Therefore, it facilitates destruction of the tiles to free up memory when changing levels.

The Navigator class

The Navigator is used to move through the tiles. It holds the current position and interprets the information in tile to only allow movement between linked tiles.

The Lookable class

The Lookable class is an abstract class from which all classes with information viewable to the user will be derrived.

The Game class

The Game interprets the player's commands, modifies the Tiles and Navigator accordingly and gives feedback to the player.

The Room class

The Room class repesents the space with which the character interacts. It is composed of information about the room viewable by the character and Interactive with which the player can interact.

The Interactive class

The Interactive class can be used by the character to modify the game state. It is currently only used in Room, but can be added to other classes (e.g. in character inventory). The level designer can create classes derrived from Interactive and override the interact method. The interact method has access public methods of Game. This allows Interactive derrived classes to link tiles, unlink tiles, teleport, add/remove Interactives from Rooms, end the game, etc. LinkerItem and DropperItem are examples of implementations.