Maps, Part 1

Armed with a box of cereal (because cereal makes the best snacks), I head off to face the first problem I have: Displaying content in the world.

First of all, I need a way to make levels. That is, I need to be able to create levels relatively easily. So let us identify the things I need to do:

• Players move around, and only in certain places.
• Events in the game are triggered by the player's position.
• Players must be able to interact with other NPCs in the world.

After some pondering, I think using Tiles would be a good idea. Each map can be composed of these Tiles, making it easier to make and edit a map, since all the map parts are already essentially floating around. In addition, every tile can have characteristics such as whether or not the player can walk on them and whether or not it triggers an event.

And then, I can have Entities in the game such as the player, NPCs, and other moveable objects that move around in the map. Hey, this is looking pretty nice! Oh, and yes, I'm programming in Java.

Now that I know what most of my objects in the game will be, I can set off to start working on this!