Imagnity Side Scroller

[Scott Ferguson]

Revised: 20160226:09:16 sf

The images for this game were provided by Sajal Dutta/Ann Peralta from the blog post 'Parallax Design Elements for a 2D Platformer Game' in the Imagnity blog:

http://www.imagnity.com/tutorials/2d-games/parallax-design-elements-for-a-2d-platformer-game/

I have added some logic for scrolling the images and a few obstacles for a car to jump over.

Update: this project has been tweaked to improve performance

New version: 2

* combined mountains into background - eliminating an image sprite

* cropped the houses and road images in height

* eliminated the 2xmountains image file from the media folder

* using a better wheel image 

* compressed images with tinypng (total images storage is now less than 100k)

* removed lists for components, using advanced blocks slows things too much

* replaced random obstacles to a sequence of unique obstacles (too many dogs were displaying!)

* Houses, Obstacle and Road Headings (180) and Speeds are set in the Designer

* the EdgeReached event blocks are used to test and reset the positions of the Houses and Road ImageSprites

* fix for blocks not positioning correctly

* jump velocity and gravity now adjusted to match device processor speed

* scrolling speed is now more consistent across devices by setting Intervals to 85 ms

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[Sajal Dutta]

The problem using clock is there's no way you can make movement smooth. We will need to use opengl context for games.

On Thursday, February 25, 2016 at 10:45:23 AM UTC+8, Scott Ferguson wrote:

I added some logic to the image assets provided at the following blog post:

http://www.imagnity.com/tutorials/2d-games/parallax-design-elements-for-a-2d-platformer-game/

[Scott Ferguson]

Yes, I agree. That is a problem with App Inventor.

Some of my games work better than others.

Animating characters and scrolling ImageSprites eats up cpu cycles very quickly since MITAI is single-threaded.

Since I am dedicated to working strictly with standard MITAI blocks and wish to avoid using the WebViewer and javascript unless it is absolutely necessary, I generally just consider it a challenge to find workarounds for MITAI's limitations.

I think I can say that I have succeeded somewhat in that regard with this project.

Although it cannot go head-to-head speedwise with javascript or Java games, it is still fun to make and play games made with App Inventor.

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[Sajal Dutta]

I agree with you Scott. I wish App Inventor added Open GL context for game development. That's the only area I so much love.

[Scott Ferguson]

...and support for sprite sheets

...and a flood fill feature

...and a built-in image editor like Scratch has

...and the ability to add blocks to the language without using Java

...and...and...and...

:-)

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