Question

Our game will be roughly based on Dark Blue (www.lessmilk.com/games/10) by Thomas Palef. I chose this game because it is both entertaining and minimalist, and because it can be built without too much code. It looks like this:

The dark box represents the player, whose task is to collect the yellow boxes (coins) while avoiding the red stuff (lava?). A level is completed when all coins have been collected.

The player can walk around with the left and right arrow keys and jump with the up arrow. Jumping is a specialty of this game character. It can reach several times its own height and is able to change direction in midair. This may not be entirely realistic, but it helps give the player the feeling of being in direct control of the onscreen avatar.

The game consists of a fixed background, laid out like a grid, with the moving elements overlaid on that background. Each field on the grid is either empty, solid, or lava. The moving elements are the player, coins, and certain pieces of lava. Unlike the artificial life simulation from Chapter 7 , the positions of these elements are not constrained to the grid—their coordinates may be fractional, allowing smooth motion.

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.