Alturos's blog: "Jungle Jim"

I've officially decided that writing (and drawing) a PLATFORMER is hard work. especially when there is a vine that the player must be able to swing from. I've named it Jungle Jim (the pun was actually not intedned as I noticed it just a couple of days ago, I thought it just sounded right) and it is my attempt at a pitfall clone, having only played pitfall for about 5 minutes some years ago, it's much more like a bastard 5th cousin twice removed than a clone, but I'm not counting. It's written entirely in C# using the (new) XNA framework, which makes some things quite easy, and others quite tough. there are several issues with it that I haven't sorted out yet. for example if you jump fast enough, you will never die when touching a log or an open mawed gator. also the lives indicator disappears when you grab the vine. This is due to the very sloppy way I handled the vines. There's only two screens and a title for now, and the underground area is never used. Ponds do nothing, same as holes, and there's no running score indicator. I'm sure you get the idea that this is not finished, but it is somewhat playable. the maps are written in XML and are quit easy to discern (or so I would think), so if you want to attempt map creation just rename edit map01.map and see what it does (break the scheme and it will probably crash, but there are some interesting things you can do with it.) also the art is god awful, but completely original. If any of you can do better and wouldn't mind, let me know. either way, try it out if you like. Two final notes, the size is quite large (7mb in the installer and I counted about 12MB for all the files, the installer says 27??) this is due to XNA recoding al the assets to a nearly raw format, and it requres the XNA framework (<2mb) which the installer will ...?! to.

I had a pretty good idea of how the code should have worked. The first step was creating the Map File Scheme. I decided on an XML based file for its ease of use and editing. before long I had an acceptable template to build from. I built up the map structure and created my first mapfile through a utility that asked for input and serialized it into a file. Next came how to handle the map and get it drawn. I decieded I wanted to use GameComponents (an XNA object essentially) because they fit the bill exactly. I wanted to have a Map Component and an array of Screen Components. each screen component would have an array of components for Crocs, Ponds, Vines, Rolling Logs, and Holes. So I created the different components for each type of item and everything seemd to look good code wise, and the code Built. Running it however was a different matter. Everything seemed right in the code but I was taking Null reference exceptions all over the place. I did some debugging and was able to track down the problem but it didn't make sense. Initialize was never being called on my nested components. My first search did not turn up well, all I found was that Nested components were not supported. M ynext option was to post on the MSDN forums, so I did with my exact problem. Bascally what ended up being the case was that since I was adding components to the game AFTER the main call to initialize, which I was doing as I needed to load the map before I could initialize my sub components, Initialize was not automatically being called for my sub components. So I added a manual call to initialize and BAM code built and ran and I had a map with everything in it.

About a year ago I started working on a PitFall type game using SDL. It was a pain staking process, but I eventually got most of the artwork done and a simple screen that hd some swinging vines and a walking man. For some reason I gave up on the project entirely and tucked it all aya in the depths of my hard drive. A couple of months ago I heard about the XNA Framework and Game Studio Express beta. I was excited at first but never really got into it. A month or so later Beta 2 was released. I downloaded it and started messing around a bit, nothing really productive, just sort of feeling it out. I liked the new system quite a bit, and had recently gotten a good grasp of C# and wanted to work on a game. Then I found the old source for my PitFall Clone, I figured I might ws well try and finish it so I looked into the code nd found that I'd left it broken and poorly documented. I then decided that since I still had all of my assets I might as well start coding from scratch in XNA. I gave the project a name, "Jungle Jim" and got right to work learning XNA.