Canabalt..or, doodle jump?.?.

SaveDave

How wide or high can I make my game area?

Can it be never ending like either of these games?

Or, do I have a screen area limit and would have to find another way round making it seem infinite ?

Thanks

CodeMonkey

You can make your game scene really big. The limitation is memory and the 1024x1024 for the images.
What you could do to make it seem infinite is you can make the background wrap and keep the player in one area.

expired_012

Making a game like doodle jump is extremely hard. Think about the memory usage before starting the project. Having the whole game in just one scene will definitely crash the game eventually. As more actors show up, the memory usage goes up. When it goes up to a certain point, it will crash and be unplayable.

The best thing to do is try to keep the RAM constant throughout your whole game, and this can be done by making levels/several scenes.

Eastbound

artonskyblue said:
Making a game like doodle jump is extremely hard. Think about the memory usage before starting the project. Having the whole game in just one scene will definitely crash the game eventually. As more actors show up, the memory usage goes up. When it goes up to a certain point, it will crash and be unplayable.

The best thing to do is try to keep the RAM constant throughout your whole game, and this can be done by making levels/several scenes.

This really isn't true. Once you use the program more you could easily set up an infinite platform game, even one that changes into different regions of platforms, like doodle jump does with sections of special platforms.

expired_012

Eastbound said:
This really isn't true. Once you use the program more you could easily set up an infinite platform game, even one that changes into different regions of platforms, like doodle jump does with sections of special platforms.

Then maybe its from my own personal experience. I tried to make a never ending helicopter game, but RAM kept on building and it crashed. I guess it can be done tho if you know how to really optimize your game

Hachiko

You just have to not spawn anything. Spawning is never good, it's better to have a pool of object. With an array it would be easy to track if an object is in the pool and therefore it's usable. Then, you just take that object and "spawn" it where you want.
Hopefully they will be in the next big update

Snow

I made a few flash games where I would pool the objects/enemies beyond the right of the screen, then I had code that would pick an object at random, give it a random y coordinate then tell it to move left across the screen. When it got beyond the left of the screen, it's position was simply reset to the pool area.

I'll be starting with GameSalad within a month here, so I haven't used it much, but I'm sure you could easily set this up in a single scene.

If you can use timers, you can set it up so that different patterns of platforms come at you at different times - as in difficulty starts to increase. If you stay alive for 2 minutes, prickly or unstable platforms start coming at you and the platforms are spaced further apart. If you stay alive for 3 minutes, enemies start showing up. Etc.