Post subject: My C# school project maze game
Player (68)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjaví­k, Ísland
Hello. I'm in some kind of extra summer credit learn C# course at my school, and I was wondering if any of you were bored enough to come up with suggestions. So we're working on this project. It's a Maze Game in which the player is supposed to navigate a maze. Yay, sounds extremely fun, but I was wondering if you had some awesome suggestions for features. Yes, I know it sucks at the moment but the point of the topic is to ask if there are any super-awesome fundamental ideas we're missing. We will hopefully add enemies and at least a randomized maze each level, but hey, I figured posting this on the best forum on the whole internet wouldn't hurt. Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of work left to do such as wrapping what we've got into a wholesome game, and many other basic things. What I mean is what are some maze-related ideas we're not getting? Just say anything, no matter how outlandish it is. We want this to be the most awesomestest maze game ever. (yeah, right) If you're actually interested checking out what we've got, we have a subversion repository thing. I'm not sure exactly where we're supposed to place files in it though. None of us have any experience whatsoever in programming games (or programming anything, for that matter). Also, at the moment all the comments are all in Icelandic. I didn't think I would ever post this anywhere, sorry. http://code.google.com/p/mazemasterpwn/ Yes, sorry about using C# and Microsoft Visual Studio, but that's kinda the point of the course. To learn that stuff.
Joined: 10/3/2005
Posts: 1332
Play and steal ideas from Nethack, because they've already done pretty much everything you can do with a maze, I think. Since you didn't forbid outlandish ideas, I also suggest learn about Tim Conway's "Game of Life" and related topics, and consider how you could exploit the properties of a maze as a kind of organism to create interesting (as opposed to random) structures for players to navigate.[/handwave] Also, your SVN appears to be empty as of revision 34.
Player (68)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjaví­k, Ísland
It's all located in svn/branches as opposed to svn/trunk/ which is where I think you are looking. I wasn't sure where to up it at first, and I'm pretty bad at using subversion, so.. yeah. Just now, I copied the latest version to trunk, I think, so maybe the project officially "exists" now. Yes, I know about the Game of Life, but never thought to use it in a project like this. I don't think it'll work though.. it would just corrupt the whole maze instantly, but I appreciate the input! It is an interesting idea too keep in one's head, for sure.
Joined: 6/14/2004
Posts: 646
Yeah, perhaps you could do something involving switches and rotating rooms. Maybe some one way doors too.
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Player (68)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjaví­k, Ísland
Cool, thanks. We had the idea that the player might have to fetch keys to go through certain doors, but switches are good, too. Rotating rooms are interesting, hadn't thought of that, though with the current implementation it would be very difficult or meaningless to implement. One-way doors are interesting. Any ideas are welcome, no matter how obvious. It might seem obvious to you, but to us, we don't really have many ideas since our imagination sucks. Both because we have many other things to think about and also because our imagination genuinely sucks. Any outside source of thinking is welcome! We're actually having a bit of trouble with this.
Joined: 1/26/2009
Posts: 558
Location: Canada - Québec
nethack is hard, mainly because savestate is not allowed(when you manage to load a previous save to fix some error: it's cheat!).. so when we're about turn 74537037th and we want to kill the goblin group(or anything easy) behind the door and we decide to just push "up" for 3 sec (without pay attention) to clear the path... the next thing that you learn is that your kitten has been polymerphed in some angry elemental and your wizard lvl15 is dead. You have to start from the beginning, because you were enought idiot to underestimate one of the easier enemy in the game. Thought this is probably why this game is so cool and looked somewhat realistic. As I said Nethack is hard about his gameplay and that's why most player just stop it, without have tryed any puzzle like the sakoban level. So making a similar roguelike(with different class, item and stuff) with a better concentration of puzzle level, would be awesome.
Experienced player (623)
Joined: 11/30/2008
Posts: 650
Location: a little city in the middle of nowhere
just some general ideas 1. Toggle on/off walls/doors 2. destroyable walls 3. invisible walls 4. visible walls that you can walk through 5. machine gun turrets! 6. a minotaur
Measure once. Cut twice.
Player (68)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjaví­k, Ísland
Yeah, we know about nethack. But we're all pretty inexperienced in game programming (or any programming for that matter) so I don't know. The features should be kept pretty simple, or at least implementable, for us. We can't program an advanced AI that will anticipate your action according to the rules of chess, for example. That's not to say we're *completely* inept. Our dream is to have the game connect to an online database for highscores and stuff, though we don't know who would host such a database. Does anyone know of a free database service thing? Otherwise we'll probably (and actually, the course requires it) set up our own mssql database thing. (supposedly it's easier than using mysql becuase we're using Microsoft Visual Basic). andymac: Thanks!
Joined: 1/26/2009
Posts: 558
Location: Canada - Québec
7. A pet to escort/help you 8. Dig to an another level/bonus? 9. Random teleporting scroll 10. Food system... die from illness? :/ 11. Item shop 12. A dark/light system in corridor 13. boost potion 14. jumping platform 15. pipe edith:
Blublu wrote:
The features should be kept pretty simple, or at least implementable, for us. We can't program an advanced AI that will anticipate your action according to the rules of chess, for example. That's not to say we're *completely* inept.
I don't think such AI would be required... thought, complexe feature are alway interesthing in a maze :)
Player (68)
Joined: 3/11/2004
Posts: 1058
Location: Reykjaví­k, Ísland
BadPotato wrote:
Blublu wrote:
The features should be kept pretty simple, or at least implementable, for us. We can't program an advanced AI that will anticipate your action according to the rules of chess, for example. That's not to say we're *completely* inept.
I don't think such AI would be required... thought, complexe feature are alway interesthing in a maze :)
I was just trying to think of the most extreme possible possibility. But I'll probably have to code in some kind of "path map" thing so that an enemy can find its way towards the player. At the moment, I have no clue how I would approach such a problem... but I'm sure I'll figure it out. Or one of the other guys I'm supposed to be doing this project with,