History
Late 2008 I was introduced to Line Rider: a small flash game that allows one to draw lines and then watch a little man on a sled fail miserably as he attempts to complete the drawn track. While my knowledge with pixel movement was scarce, I wanted to confirm that a game similar to Line Rider could be accomplished on BYOND. At the time I had no idea that the collision system I was constructing was named 'bounding box', I just believed it would be a great idea to adjust an atom's x1, x2, y1, and y2 coordinates based on its size.
In no less than a week I created LineWalk: a pale white creature who walks on lines drawn by the player.
I had intended to create a full game with this little engine I developed, but there were a few flaws. First of all the collision was severely broken, at certain points on the map you could walk through solid objects. Next, for some odd reason when one jumped the game would frequently crash. The last flaw was that BYOND could not correctly handle online games that used pixel movement. Tied with my frequent loss of enthusiasm, the game was quickly dumped onto a flash drive and it sat there for nearly two years.
Recently
Late 2009 I met Fugsnarf, who was one of the few active developers who were exploring pixel movement. We frequently discussed the possibilities of it and I had fun attempting to impress him with my numerous demonstrations. Soon thereafter, he and SuperAntx created numerous pixel movement related bug/feature reports which grabbed Lummox JR's attention. In early 2010 Tom and crew released, in my opinion, a landmark update that vastly improved networking. I quickly created a shooter to see how this update worked online.
I was excited that playing online was just as smooth as offline, so I was enticed into creating several other online demonstrations. This urged me into completely remaking my engine.
Recently Qubic asked if I was going to release my 'pixel movement & bounding box collision' library anytime soon. I stated that I would and started working on it, but as an hour passed I somehow was remaking LineWalk. In no more than two hours, I already had a demonstration ready to be played. Also, sorry Qubic, I will get you the library one day!
LineWalk is essentially one of my dream games, an online cooperative casual game that allows customization and can be played for hours. I love playing this game just as much as I do making it. To my knowledge, it is still the only game that uses bounding box collision and it is also the first online pixel movement game on BYOND. Presently, in LineWalk a Guide is selected, this person is allowed to draw paths and their goal is to get the players to the exit. Points are awarded to players who complete the map while the Guide gets one point per escapee. Once every player is either dead or finished, a new round commences in which the player with the most points is designated as the Guide. The game is a very amusing as you watch numerous players fall to their death as they are trying to escape in the time allotted.
In the upcoming weeks I will do an overhaul on the graphics and interface. I may also scrap the 'work in progress' name: LineWalk. Before the release, I plan on creating a series of posts that slowly introduces the community to the features of the game. Along with that, I would also like to get some online testing done, just to ensure the game is bug-free.
I would also like to thank Lawlergasm and Abysion for taking the time out to help me test LineWalk online. In addition, thanks go towards Forum_account and SuperAntx, your recommendation of a line tool, which automatically fills in gaps between lines, drastically improved the game.
