Background

The Raccoon King is a side-scrolling platformer for the computer in the play style of the original Prince of Persia. I am the sole developer, and the intention of this game is for it to be used as a submission to the Technology Student Association (TSA) competition this year.

I am nearing completion of my quick prototype, which is written in Game Maker, and I expect to begin work on the final engine in C++ sometime this week.

The basic premise of the story is that you're a boy who lives on a farm. One day, when you're out in the woods, your family is kidnapped by the Fat Raccoon. You go and try to rescue them, only to be thrown in to a dungeon. After 5 levels of exploring, you find equipment and learn to do daring new things, and you have to kill the raccoon at the very end.

Yes; it's a flat story, but it's not a JRPG or anything hehe.

The planned online release date for this project is late March or early May. I will probably release a few playable demos before then though.






Modules, Formats, and Goals:

KAS Format:
-Add compression
-Improve Checksum

Main Engine
-Set up a backend-independent interface (For easy switching between OpenGL, SDL, etc)



Updates:
11/20/11 - Created the .kas format, a file grouping format, along with the code needed to interface with it.




Current screenshots:

11/19/11

Sometimes I have a bit much fun formatting my code:


Tech demo 01:

11/19/11

(There's quite a bit more to it than this, but I haven't made all the sprites just yet. When I get rid of all my placeholder sprites, I'll make a full tech demo)

Looks like you have a firm handle on what you are wanting to do. Hope to see more shots later on

The whole thing looks very simple so far as a platformer. One thing I really, really, really like: the art style. Especially the fluidity between the different movements -- looking good!

I love the art style indeed, very unique! I'm extremely curious what the backend that creates random, realistic pencil-drawn cubes looks like.

Please tell me you aren't in Tennessee x.x If you are, we can go ahead and hand the trophy over to you. :'(

Haha! Nope, I'm in Washington. You're safe... at least until Nationals :3



I just have 20 images of hand drawn cubes from which it randomly selects one each frame... Nothing too too special. In the end I plan to have everything that way; every image will be drawn 2-4 (or more for some things like scenery) times, and on every redraw, it'll redraw a random one from its pool of images.

I can't help but feel that that would peg the CPU, especially on larger maps. Oh well, I'm sure it would have to do some random numbers anyways (just not of the 100*100 scale ).

Also, yay, you're far away Though, now you've gotten me working on my game, so I can't be lazy now >.> Be sure to keep us updated and post screenshots to make us envious

Redrawing the entire screen is quite speedy, believe it or not. Also; selective redrawing (Only redrawing what can be seen) does wonders for speed. I'm not so naive that I'm going to redraw the entire map every frame =p

Time to finish up the last fiddly bits in my movement engine.

Aww, I'm disappointed that it's choosing from pre-drawn sprites instead of a dynamic engine to create those sort of graphics, but still extremely impressive, so I'm sorry for being disappointed. Keep up the great work!

But, dynamically creating those images would be very taxing on execution speed as well I would personally take the approach he's taking, though making them dynamically does sound cool

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely the sane, intelligent way to do things. I'm just enough of a curious low-level hacker () to wish there was an elegant way to generate those sorts of sketches on-the-fly.

SVG paths, randomize the point locations a tad, and apply a pencil drawing image, or static noise that is generated, along the paths. Add more advanced things like variable pressures, curving the lines a bit, etc., and it will look nice