Building the Rooms

The idea behind this episode of the game is that the player is dreaming that they are in a maze of rooms being chased by something. The rooms are connected in a non-linear fashion, but the rooms each have their own color. Thinking about this, all the rooms in the game will look the same except for their color. This means that all we have to do is create a single room and then duplicate it five times changing the colors in the duplicates! There, however, is an even better way of handling the creation of the rooms. Tinting!

To make tinting work the best, it is best to create the non-tinted image using gray-scale. I am going to keep the game in third person perspective so that we don't have all the work required to move an animated figure around. This means that the room needs to be drawn to look three dimensional. To better add to the three dimensional look, I created a tiled floor. This was done by drawing receding lines, then by drawing lines in the distance and angling them so that there is a larger distance between the closer points than the further points. Had I been really ambitious I could have created a far off point (a vanishing point) and having all the horizontal lines coming from that point. I then filled in the squares and finally removed the lines.

The ceiling I wanted to be stuccoed. This would have required a huge amount of work to accomplish using vectors, so I opted to use a texture for this image. The texture was generated in fireworks, but all high-end paint programs (and many low end ones as well) have texture creation support.

The three doors that are in the scene are actually all the same. I drew the far door and then used the distort command to alter the other two doors. While I could have been picky and tried to get the doors to look perfect, to keep the dream motif, I wanted the doors to be a bit distorted.

There are a number of ways of dealing with the room once you have the gray-scale done and want to apply tinting. This could be done within the program. Though tinting is a very costly operation, you would only have to do it once when you entered the room. Another option, which is the approach I took, is to create copies of the gray-scale image and individually tint those symbols. The advantage of doing this is you can get a bit better result from the tinting by tinting different parts of the room with different shades of the room color. The floors and ceiling were tinted a slightly different shade then the walls and doors, resulting in nicer looking rooms from the original flash version of this game.

Now that we have the rooms ready, we need to link them together which is what we will be doing next fortnight.

Planning the Adventure

The basic theme behind nightmare maze is that you are lost in a maze and must move quickly from room to room before the evil Blue Screen of Death reaches you.  The maze in this game is consistent in the fact that the same door will take you to the same room, however it is not commutative meaning that the door from A to B does not necessarily go back to A. This means while there is a structure to the maze it works different then the real world, which is typical of dreams.

Mazes are fairly easy to implement. This maze, however, is not a linear maze. With a linear maze, you can use graph paper to plan out the maze. This is obviously not the case with a non-linear maze. Instead, a different type of graph is used for creating a non-linear maze. This graph consists of the rooms drawn as boxes with arrowed lines showing how the rooms connect. I used a variation on this having colored lines corresponding to the room the line is from.

As you can see by the above map, the links between rooms are fairly complex. However implementing the links is actually very easy. You can also see that there are a lot of ways of reaching the exit, but do to the fact that there is nothing highlighting the exit, a player could end up being stuck in the maze for quite a while.

The room approach is very common in adventure games as travelling between locations is a very common activity. Generally, when designing an adventure game, each location will be considered to be a room even if it is an outside location. This allows for rooms to be worked on independently of each other and for earlier computers that had a very limited amount of memory would allow for the computer to only have to load the drawing data for the room that the player was currently in then having some type of transition animation between "rooms" when the player left a room and the game had to load in the image for the next room.

From a programming perspective, having rooms that are connected together with lines allows us to represent the map as a mathematical graph in which each room is a vertex of the graph and the connections between rooms are the edges of the graph.  Graph theory, however, is not necessary to build an adventure game. All that really matters is that you are able to create a basic map of the locations within the adventure so that you can move between them. The map can also be used to plan out where objects are located in the world and what obstacles or puzzles there are in the game. This allows for a walk through of the game before you have even started any real work on building the game so that you know that the game is solvable.

Once the map is planned out you then have the ability to itemize all the assets that will be needed for the game and can start work on building the art needed for each of the rooms. Building the rooms is what we will be doing next fortnight, but thanks to the nature of our maze this is a lot easier for this game than it would be for most other adventure games.