Sidescroller platformer or shoot-em-up

butterbean

If anyone has created either a sidescrolling shooter, or platformer with a "looping background", can you show me a link to how you've looped the background in your game, or how it is done within the program

It has really helped me in the past, thank you!

I know this topic has come up before, but I wanted to see if anyone could past or link their "way" of doing it

JGary321

You could just Copy/Paste your scene in photoshop & create a really long scene

I guess there may be more efficient ways though. I haven't created a side scroller so I can't really say as of right now.

quantumsheep

I think there's a limit on how big a sprite can be; 1024x1024 if I remember correctly from the official Apple documentation...

You could have a look in this thread: http://gamesalad.com/forums/topic.php?id=85

May be some help there, though I haven't tried it myself (it's on the list!).

QS

butterbean

Thanks Quantum and JGary!

I do remember that thread, but I thought it would be easier for me to do if someone could paste an example from their own game prototype

I understand the concept or idea, but thought it would be easiest to see a sample, I'll go ahead and try a few things

nulo

what i did is the following;
i created the background image, making it loop-able.
then inside gamesalad, i created a actor for that background image.
then all i did was duplicate the actor inside my scene and place it right beside each other.
this way i didnt need a huge image, since i made the looping inside gs.

a more "professional" way would be making a rule that when the bg actor reaches a certain value in "x" the he goes back to the beginning (something like "x" + 1/2 of the image width(but this totally depends on the images width)) then you just need to find the exact point where you can loop your image.

butterbean

So which works better? I don't really care if it's "professional" as long as it works

So you literally took 2 images of the same prototype, and placed them right next to each other, and that allowed your image to loop?

Do you think you will end up doing it by placing values?

It would be a nice addition if Gamesalad came up with an attribute of some sort to loop the image over and over

Thanks Nulo!

nulo

in my game i did it with the first option. it will all depend on the performance of the game on the iphone and ipod. if you have a huge scene, and you have to duplicate the bg actor 10x and it doesnt affect the game performance than theres no problem. but if the duplicating thing starts to affect performance then the way to go will be making a rule base on the bg actor position.

one important thing to think about is that, unless you have a bg image that should move exactly like the foreground level (using the scrollable layers in gs), the your total bg image would always be at least half the width of your total level. (since it will move slower)

RebelliousRobot

It's probably better practice to use the position-based loop method. At least, that's what I learned from my Actionscript tutorials.