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HWYDT: Donkey Kong

JoeStrout on January 11, 2024

This is the first in a series of posts where I'll be addressing the question: How would you do that?! In today's post, we'll be looking...
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JoeStrout

Hey there! Did you find this interesting or helpful? Are there any other games that make you think "How would you do that?" Let me know, and I'll follow this up with more posts delving into whatever mysteries you find!

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Sebastian Nozzi

Yes! Something comes to mind ... might be easy, but maybe not obvious - and at least an interesting problem: climbing up ladders. How to detect when there is one, how to animate going up / down, and when (and how) to stop and be on the ground again. What do you think?

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JoeStrout

/sys/lib/spriteControllers actually makes this pretty easy, but I felt it was too much to cram into this post. Sounds like we need a follow-up post using the same tileset, but focused on the ladders! Thanks for the idea.

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Sebastian Nozzi

It could evolve into a series analyzing the mechanics of Donkey Kong and implementing them in Mini Micro ...

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Trey Tomes

I was just about to ask this very same question about the ladders. :-) I'd love to see a follow-up post here.

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Sebastian Nozzi

Great post! And "the secret of Donkey Kong" almost sounds like the title of a new game :-D

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Sebastian Nozzi

I'm curious: what did you use to write the tile-numbers (indexes) ...? Because I assume you used some sort of automation here ...

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JoeStrout • Edited

Haha, no, I confess to using a drawing program, and manually typing each of those 88 numbers!

For tile sets where the tiles are bigger, setting up your TileDisplay (td) and doing view td.tileset shows the image with all the numbers overlaid. But when the tiles are only 8x8 pixels, like these, they're too small — the numbers all overlap and are illegible!