Pi at Sea Survival

[The_Bean]

For my ENG4U English class FSE/ISU my group read Life of Pi, and for part of our presentation we made a game called 'Pi at Sea Survival'.
Coded: Me
Pictures: McCulloch, Alexmula, Me
Tested: Me, McCulloch, Alexmula

Instructions:
Up Arrow: Go
Left Arrow: Steer Left - (can only steer when in motion)
Right Arrow: Steer Right - (can only steer when in motion)

Objective:
Stay alive tell day 227
Eat fish for food and points
Avoid sharks, they hurt you and you lose points
Turtles appear randomly every 15-25 days:
-they move really fast
-give full health
-temporarily increase boat speed
Day 151-156 Pi goes blind and you can only see a small circle around your boat, you will need to use the fish finder in the bottom right to stay alive.

If the buttons on the main menu, and the buttons in the background of the instructions window are different then you might not have the required fonts.

[Alexmula]

best game ever

[Insectoid]

I would make the turtle a little slower.

This definitely goes on my list of 'Best Turing Programs Ever'.

How the hell did you get it to load gifs?

Any chance of a source release?

[The_Bean]

The turtle is suppose to be that fast, because in the book they rarely come by, and when they do it's really hard for Pi, the boy, to get them on the boat and kill them.

Turing 4.1 and 4.1.1 both load gif's, unfortunately are school computers don't have it so I have to carry it on my usb.

I won't be releasing the source for a while, but if you want to know how something specific works I can tell you.

[Insectoid]

So you can have translucent gifs in 4.1.1? That is good news! Can it load animated gifs?

I understand how all the individual parts work, but putting it all together in a way efficient enough that it doesn't lag is impressive!

[Homer_simpson]

nice

[dc116]

Awesome game!! But how comes the boat moves insanely slow? And I can't seem to turn back!

[The_Bean]

Is it just the boat that's slow, or the entire game?
You can't go backwards. Only forwards, and you have to be moving in order to steer.

[Insectoid]

The_Bean, your incredibly works continue to surprise and amaze me. I wish I had half the skill and dedication that you have. Or maybe my graphics-drawing-ableness just sucks...

Either way, you definitely know how to write a game!

[andrew.]

insectoid @ Thu Jan 08, 2009 7:42 pm wrote:

So you can have translucent gifs in 4.1.1? That is good news! Can it load animated gifs?

I understand how all the individual parts work, but putting it all together in a way efficient enough that it doesn't lag is impressive!

Yeah, Turing 4.1.1 can load animated GIFs. It's a bit more complicated than just var picID : int := Pic.FileNew though.

@OT: Wow, that is a great game. I would really like to know how you handled the rotation of the shark and the boat and HUD and stuff. I'm not good at rotating things properly.

[The_Bean]

Thanks for compliments.

The reason for using gif was because turing only supports gif, bmp, jpg.
-jpg has fuzz around it when using picMerge because of the quality of image
-bmp doesn't naturally support transparency, so it was annoying to work with in photoshop
-gif was the only one left and it worked perfectly.

To get animated gif's in turing you need to:
-find the number of frames in it first with: Pic.Frames ()
-make an array with that many elements
-Pic.FileNewFrames () will load the frames from the gif with a set delay into the array
-Pic.DrawFramesBack () will draw it while the program continues
-Pic.DrawFrames () will pause the program until the gif is finished

Only the boat and raft are actually rotated with: Pic.Rotate(),
everything else is just: Pic.Mirror()
The compass and health are just ThickLines with trig.

We were originally planning on having everything rotated, so the fish would swim in the direction they were traveling along the sin curve, but turing can only hold 1000 images and the raft and boat had already used 720 which were the most important things.

Speed was a major issue because everything had to be drawn in picMerge which takes a lot of time especially for big images, so we had to bump up the speeds of everything, so the collision detection is very rough with just circles around everything, but it doesn't have to be perfect for a game like this.

[The_Bean]

This is roughly what I was hoping to do with the fish originally. But like the online high scores, just wasn't possible.

[hellbenderdescent]

This was really fun
Great job

[Turing_Gamer]

Wow this game is rather slow progress but addicting.

+ KARMA

Here were some of my thoughts during the game:

"Alright, let's go easy."
*Clicked Easy*
"Okay, nice boat. Love it's movement... Hey there are some fishies"
*Makes boat run into the fish*
"Muah ha ha ha!"
*Turtle moves across screen very fast*
"Wow, what the !@#$"
*Another shark appears*
"Oh crap."
*After awhile*
"I wonder if he made those images himself..."
*Reached day 100*
"This will take a while! GET THE FISH!!!"
*Another shark appears*
"Oh god"
*Avoiding the sharks, the boat misses 5 fish in 1 spot*
"ALA DAMN-IT!!!" - Achmed the dead-terrorist
*Ran into shark*
"Crap!"
*Around day 110*
"Nice game. Ill run into those 3 sharks and end the game"
*Game ends, entered high score, looked at the NoName*
"That is one bug to fix."
*Saw menu and exit button*
"Alright. A very good game it was. Going to post my thoughts like this now."
*Clicked Exit. Some time later, I played again and ran into the turtle*
"Oh, crap... Wait, wtf. Im fast all of a sudden! Thank you god for giving me turtles to eat. Reminds me of Pirates of the Caribbean..."

Sorry for long dialogue

[Lucman909]

Great game man! Loved it!