Ryan Goldsmith

Camera Movement

Since Super Mario has a moving camera this meant I had to render everything in respect to where the camera. After implementing a camera parameter to my Texture2D.Draw() and did the calculations to render object in the correct place everything came together quite easily until the camera would only follow mario when playing multiplayer. To solve this I took the center points of both players and put the camera in the middle point and then stopped the players from walking off the screen. Below are some tweets I made demonstrating the camera.

...
void GameScreenLevel1::CameraMovementLogic()
{
	//Two Players
	if (mPlayers.size() == 2)
	{
		if (mPlayers.size() == 2)
		{
			if (mPlayers[0]->GetX() > mPlayers[1]->GetX())
			{
				mCamera->x = (mPlayers[1]->GetX() + (mPlayers[1]->GetHitbox()->w / 2) 
					+ ((mPlayers[0]->GetX() - mPlayers[1]->GetX())) / 2) - (mCamera->w / 2);
			}
			else
			{
				mCamera->x = (mPlayers[0]->GetX() + (mPlayers[0]->GetHitbox()->w / 2) 
					+ ((mPlayers[1]->GetX() - mPlayers[0]->GetX())) / 2) - (mCamera->w / 2);
			}
		}
	}
	//Single Player
	else
	{
		mCamera->x = mPlayers[0]->GetX() - (SCREEN_WIDTH / 2);
	}

	//Stop camera going past world boundaries
	if (mCamera->x < 0)
	{
		mCamera->x = 0;
	}
	if (mCamera->y < 0)
	{
		mCamera->y = 0;
	}
	if (mCamera->x + mCamera->w > mMapTileWidth* DEFAULTTILEWIDTH* RENDERSCALE)
	{
		mCamera->x = (mMapTileWidth * DEFAULTTILEWIDTH * RENDERSCALE) - mCamera->w;
	}
	if (mCamera->y < mCamera->h)
	{
		mCamera->y = 0;
	}
}					

Map Loading

Each level is stored within a .txt file which is loaded in when the level is being loaded and all the objects are being placed into the correct places. Having a txt loaded allowed me to debug my game very quickly as I could move a object I wished to debug closer to my character, also if I had more time It would be easier to add a tile based map editor which would save in txt format.
Also having a txt file allowed me to see the map within the txt file and made it much quicker for me to recreate some of the original mario levels without having to set the exact positions or each object manually. Also using a txt file allowed me to create smaller methods to correct certain objects to make them look correct in game. An example of this is the pipes. The pipes position is symbolised as a 'p' in the text file and the texture of the pipe is corrected dependant on adjacent tiles, as shown in the image on the right.

Bricks & Power-Ups

For my C++ #SuperMario remake I today got brick bouncing to work #gamedev #gameprogramming #indiedev #cpp #retrogames #gamedevelopment pic.twitter.com/XA91349T81

— Ryan (@RGoldsmith429) March 12, 2020

In Super Mario there are powerups which have different effects on Mario, I implemented a mushroom and the fire flower however due to the lack of time I had with the project I was unable to implement fire balls however the characters sprites change and when hit he will return to big Mario. Because of these powerups I needed a way to spawn them into the game and allow the player to collect them so just like Super Mario I created bricks. These bricks work how they do in super mario where small Mario cannot break bricks but can open '?' blocks and big mario can break bricks.
As Shown in the tweet on the left there is support for multiplayer if a player is stood ontop of a brick. Also in the video you can see mario picking up power Ups. To show a player is collecting a powerup i created a function which follows the 0.5 Cos(x) + 0.5 graph to create a smooth fade as opposed to a flash. Below shows the function in code:

...
void Player::FadeLogic()
{
	if (mFading)
	{
		float result = ((0.5 * cos(mFadeDegrees * 3.14159265 / 180.0)) + 0.5) * 255;
		mFadeDegrees += 0.5;

		if (mFadeTime > 500 && mFadeDegrees >= 360)
		{
			mFading = false;
			mFadeTime = 0;
			mInvunerable = false;
		}
		else
		{
			SDL_SetTextureAlphaMod(mTexture->GetTexture(), result);
			mFadeTime++;
		}

		if (mFadeDegrees >= 360.0)
		{
			mFadeDegrees = 0.0;
		}
	}
}
						

I am happy to go into further detail for this or any projects on my portfolio if needs be.

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