[NDS] Amy Zing and the Amazing Mazes

ANT512 offers "Amy Zing and the Amazing mazes ", a labyrinth game with 3 levels of difficulty for the Nintendo DS.

I used the Kruskal algorithm to generate the mazes. On the linked page the author complains that the algorithm “tends to create a lot of short dead-ends”, but that property makes it perfect for toddlers who don’t have the patience for extensive backtracking when they take the wrong path.

The game itself took almost no time at all to write; excluding libraries and presentation fluff the game weighs in at around 600 lines of C. The most complex tasks were fixing a weird rendering bug (that turned out to be a missing conversion between co-ordinate systems in the layer library) and writing a bunch of transitions between scenes. The first, and most troublesome, transition looks just like this one I made 7 years ago in JavaScript (hit refresh if the image doesn’t show up; the script doesn’t preload the image), but with the addition of fade out as the image disappears. Unfortunately that proved too complex for both the DS and the 3DS to render at 60fps so I replaced it with a simpler cross-fade transition.

There’s no title screen bitmap and the player’s character is just a red box. I’d intended to come up with a pixel art title screen showing Amy Zing herself, and an Amy Zing sprite that would wander around the mazes, but that’s beyond the limit of my drawing ability (if anyone is interested in contributing a title screen and a sprite in 3 sizes, let me know).

Tinkering with menu systems, transitions, difficulty levels, presentation and general polish took long enough that the toddler in question has long since lost interest in solving mazes.

download http://simianzombie.com/posts/2017/1...-amazing-mazes
via http://www.nintendomax.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=16480