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.
