Crossroads CE

Introduction
Over the last week or so, I've been sporadically working on a project that I've been mulling over for some time now: an infinite runner inspired by Crossy Road and Frogger, for the CE. I'm somewhat doing this because I want a short break from VYSION 2 CE (don't worry, I'll resume full work on that promptly after this is done and development will continue throughout this project), and somewhat because I miss making games for the CE and want to see how I can apply what I've learned to a new one.

Progress
Basic game mechanics: 40%
Graphics: 1%
Menus: 0%
Characters: 0%

Latest screenshot
Here's a screenshot of what the project currently looks like, showing the input system, random map generation, entity movement, and so on. For reference, the brown rectangles are logs, white rectangles are vehicles, green squares are trees, and gray squares are rocks.


Conclusion
That’s all for now. Keep checking the thread for updates as I continue this project, and please post any feedback or suggestions you have as well. Stay tuned!

I want a magically appearing car

Nice work! Looks like fun - I imagine with graphics it will look even more cool

Looks great so far! I look forward to seeing it when you have some actual textures/sprites implemented.

As a side note, it does look like some of those vehicles are popping up out of nowhere instead of smoothly moving in from the side. But I imagine this is already on your list to fix.

That has to do with the (at least as far as I can tell after playing the original game for reference) requirement that the gaps between cars be maintained as they wrap around the side of the screen. Eventually, the viewing window will be small enough that you won't be able to see the cars spawning in and that will no longer be an issue (or I'll simply make the possible valid range for vehicle coordinates wider), but for now I agree that it looks odd.

Very cool, I can't wait to play it

How are you handling generating maps?

To start with, it's important to note that there are offscreen buffers both at the top and bottom of the map that handle the generation of new lanes (or rows on the map) and the saving of lanes at the bottom of the screen (so the player can move backwards a few lanes).

When the player moves forward, the lanes are shifted down by 1. Then, it's checked whether the topmost visible lane is empty, and if so, we can generate between 1 and (top buffer size) lanes of a random type (e.g. road, grass, river) in the top buffer. After that, each of these lanes is randomly populated with entities depending on what type it is--so roads will get entities that are able to move across the screen, grass will get filled with still entities, and so on. Then the next time the map is advanced, this process is repeated until we run out of the new lanes that were just generated, and some more are at that point. This means that there will generally be at least a few lanes in a row of any given type rather than total chaos.

I'm not sure if that's exactly the explanation you're looking for--please ask follow-up questions if you want me to clarify anything.

This looks really great already! I can't wait to see how it'll look when it's finished. Keep up the great work

development is going fast on that! If only that same speed could be used for vysion 2.

VYSION 2 is much more complex than this project, and as such creating new features requires more debugging and checking compatibility with other code. Also, most of the things that I've been working on recently span many different parts of the project--input, graphics, the layout of the GUI, etc. For Crossroads, I can just make a quick new addition and it will just work (as well as being more immediately visible since there is less work put into it overall).

Small update on this: I made many improvements relating to player and entity movement, which includes the ability to snap to entities, entities moving backwards, and the elimination of the pop-in that was mentioned earlier. Here's a screenshot:



Changelog
[improved] player snaps to entities
[improved] entities can now move backward
[improved] entity bounds

Very nice, now I can get run over by white blocks

Indeed you can. For anyone who's interested in progress on this, I've been messing around with it a bit recently and attempting to make graphics for it.

Stay tuned for more updates!