Plan for Spiro Harvey

Work has really kicked off for me and Karl on our 2D puzzle/platformer for the GBA. The protagonist is a metalhead/petrolhead - in NZ slang, a bogan - which will make for some interesting times :)

Karl's done some awesome sprites, and I'm finally at the stage where I have the protagonist moving around the screen and jumping.

The next step is to have the sprite change frames as he walks, jumps and climbs. At the simplest level, I have the frame changing when he jumps, and I can change the frame when he walks, but changing it back when he stands still and cycling as he's walking is ye tto be acheived.

After that, I will think about how I am going to go about controlling his movements around the level. I'm not sure whether I have to make all the platforms he's going to jump on into sprites, or if I will have to maintain arrays of what is where. My unknowledgable idea is to detect where on the screen the sprite is, and determine what can be done from there. This will get very cumbersome, codewise, per level. And I will be opening myself up to bugs galore.

The language of choice for the game is a development platform called Catapult, by some guys in Australia. It's a very nice system with built in palette/tile/font editors. Well, the font editor is in the licensed version which I've yet to buy, but once I get a bit more knowledge in the language, I'm going to register it. It really is great.

If anyone can share some wisdom on how 2D platformers are typically laid out, and how sprite movement is controlled/limited, I'm interested in hearing. Amazon and the net have a lot of info which is very suitable for 3D games design, but not much aimed at 2D that I've found...