Oh. My. God.
How similar! It's actually not, and pure co-incodence that we draw our maps in the same way. I'd better announce right here and now that I made that game purely of my own imagination a couple of years ago.
There is actually a bit of a story to it. A couple of years ago, my knowledge of programming was very limited. I wanted to make a game where you would move a character, the letter "I", around the screen to find the "hidden" treasure. There was in fact a blank screen, with no walls, and the treasure was this little plus sign on the opposite side of the screen. I only new of basic inputs back then. So to move left, right, up and down, you would press the numbers 4, 6, 8 or 2, followed by "ENTER" button, to move (there was this little blocked off section in the top left hand corner dedicated for a Prompt section where you would enter this code. The player would then move when you pressed "ENTER". Thankfully, my friend told me to learn more programming tricks by analysing other peoples games (ironically, he knows nothing about programming, but thought the idea might work). Every time I went to the program editor of a game, it was written in Assembly, and I couldn't decode it. But one day I came across this "bowling" game, which was written in pure BASIC. I read the code, and looked at the foreign looking codes, analysed them, tested them, guessed what they were, experimented with them, and conquered them. I am very proud of myself for doing that. Amongst these commands was the revolutionary "getkey" command.
Anyway, if you weren't bored already from reading my life story, I just wanted to say that back then I never used matrices, and had my level data stored as parallel strings, one array for each tile (8*16=128 list items). Very tedious compared to my current re-vamped version, using parallel matrices - much easier to create levels with.
Umm, just had a look at that game. My program uses parallel matrices, to indicate what the floor looks like, and what the floor actually is. I also use a look-up table of all of the characters it is possible to draw on the map, and use that in cooperation with the Image Matrice to display characters, rather than the tedious "if this, display that" method.
But yes, it is a similar concept. Have you passed level 3 yet?
Cheers ~ James Kanjo
