Games / Level Packs etc.

[Ninjadoodle]

Hi @enpu / Panda People

I've posted a similar question in the past, but I'm still thinking about this, especially as I'm finishing off my game.

I normally release my games as bite sized coffee break games, instead of waiting until I have 100's of levels worth of content.

For example - the game I'm currently remaking in Panda 2 has 20 levels. Part 2 also has 20 levels, and I'm also planning out part 3.

For the sake of regular releases, web-page views and selling licenses, I like putting these games out in episodes.

However, on iOS / Android / Instant Games, I'm unsure whether it's a good idea to do the same thing. It seems like those platforms prefer to have everything in one big package.

I'm really struggling to find a way of doing this without having to maintain a whole new codebase for a 'collection' game, which includes all 3 parts.

I've played around with Panda and loading assets and so on, from different folders, but things get quite messy and hard to keep track off.

Any ideas on how I could save myself some work here, or is the only option to make a 'collection app' from scratch.

Thank you in advance for any ideas!

PS. I keep thinking it would be awesome, to have some sort of loader (made in Panda) which can load different games. Almost like a shell / menu, that allows for loading separate games / level packs.

[Wolfsbane]

I'm not sure I follow you. It would depends a lot on the design of the actual game, but otherwise, you can probably just customize the index.html file, put a GUI in it, and you can just select which episode to play from there. I'm assuming the games share the same resources, they just have different main.js, so you then just fire off whichever main.js you want to run?

[Ninjadoodle]

Hi @Wolfsbane

Sorry, it’s quite hard to explain. I’m essentially talking about simple puzzle games which might have 20 levels. Then instead of adding levels to the game, I would release a game called ‘round 2’ etc.

Once I have maybe three parts/episodes, I would like to release an app devices etc.

I can’t think of a way to organise my project, so it doesn’t become unvieldly.

Modifying the index file would work, but then I couldn’t use pandas export option for apps

Might just have to do this the hard way lol.

thanks for the tips!

[pstrejczek]

7 hours ago, Ninjadoodle said:

Hi @Wolfsbane

Sorry, it’s quite hard to explain. I’m essentially talking about simple puzzle games which might have 20 levels. Then instead of adding levels to the game, I would release a game called ‘round 2’ etc.

Once I have maybe three parts/episodes, I would like to release an app devices etc.

I can’t think of a way to organise my project, so it doesn’t become unvieldly.

Modifying the index file would work, but then I couldn’t use pandas export option for apps

Might just have to do this the hard way lol.

thanks for the tips!

I can imagine that kind of architecture, where you store your levels in modules. I don't know if there is a way in Panda2 to dynamically attach a module - but if there is, you could simply have a text file or json with list of modules which contain levels. You could then load them when they are needed. So you would have a core game app and levels as modules. In this approach, it would be possible to release the game with the level set you want. I know it forces a very good code design on the core game app side, but this way it would be very versatile. You could keep the game code as a whole, but release only what you want. The only problem would be assets - but I can imagine you could name them after modules (by adding some prefix to the filename) and attach them in level scene, so they could be just removed from the folder (just like modules) when preparing the release.

I don't know if this makes sense. Just my 5 cents  

[Ninjadoodle]

Hi @pstrejczek

Thank you for the ideas, and yup it makes sense to me

@enpu - has given me some guidelines (similar to yours) in a separate topic, and I'm trying to make them work for this project - no success so far lol.

The thread to the technique, I'm trying to use is here, in case your interested ...

 

[Ninjadoodle]

Hi @Wolfsbane @pstrejczek

In case you guys are interested, or need something like this in the future - I think I have this working, using the system @enpu outlined in the topic above

Thanks again for the tips!