Platform
Andrea has been playing a lot of Mario on the DS over the past few weeks, which has gotten me thinking about game programming again. Writing a platform game could be pretty good fun, even more so if I used Microsoft’s XNA to do so, because then I could play it on the 360.
I’ve therefore been analysing Mario a little to see what challenges I might face (beyond the fact that my knowledge of C# is pretty slim at this point and I can’t draw) and from what I can see, the engine is really quite simple. There’s one single player, he can jump, he can run. He can jump on enemies heads to kill them or pick up a power up that allows him to shoot basic fireballs. The enemies themselves are pretty basic, they walk back and forth on a platform but not much else, very linear paths. And finally he can hit blocks from below to break them, pick up coins and go down pipes. None of which seems particularly complex. The gameplay comes purely from the level design rather than the engine itself being powerful.
Which is what gives me hope that I could actually do it, because it really does seem like a good introductory programming challenge. Maybe something to look at seriously later this year.
