Creating Oceans

The oceans are just a map that have direction flows attached to each tile. This is essentially a map just like the ones used in the maze episodes or car chase episode. In fact, the Coffee Quest Construction Set can be used to create the map used with this episode. The only trick needed is to replace the Coffee Quest oriented tiles with tiles that represent the tiles used in this game. While technically, the icons that Coffee Quest uses could be used as long as we remember the symbols have different meanings, it is just as easy to copy the construction set jar file to a different directory and use a new image for the tile sets. Below is the image file used for the construction set.

The tiles, from left to right are: Water, sand, west, north, east, south, west or north, north or east, east or south, south or west, and blue screen island. You will notice that there are four tiles in this image that never actually made it into the game. These would be the two direction tiles which would just let the player pass through the tile in the direction they were heading. I decided that these tiles made the game a bit over-complex from a player perspective so simply did not bother to implement them.

The construction set allows you to easily put together the final map. Once the map has been created, the text-based output format that the construction set uses allows for the map to be easily added to the source code of the game. While the maps do not need to be hard coded into the game, that is the fastest and easiest way of getting the map data. If you were developing a multi-level game using this type of map, you might want to invest extra time in loading the map data off the web server. In fact, creating an xml file that contains the maps and other per-level information would certainly be a good approach to creating a game.