A new issue of the excellent game design and coding magazine Wireframe is now available offering a chance for you to learn more about the iconic game Gauntletand even code your very own four player cooperative mode in Python and Pygame Zero. Other features in June’s issue include :
– How using player groups can transform game design
– The life and tragic demise of the Commodore Amiga
– Inside Italy’s vibrant and growing games industry
– Composer Gareth Coker on scoring Ori and the Will of the Wisps
“Atari’s Gauntlet was an eye-catching game, not least because it allowed four people to explore its dungeons together. Each player could choose one of four characters, each with its own abilities – there was a warrior, a Valkyrie, a wizard, and an elf – and surviving each dungeon required slaughtering enemies and the constant gathering of food, potions, and keys that unlocked doors and exits.
Designed by Ed Logg, and loosely based on the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons, as well as John Palevich’s 1983 dungeon crawler, Dandy, Gauntlet was a big success. It was ported to most of the popular home systems at the time, and Atari released a sequel arcade machine, Gauntlet II, in 1986.
Atari’s original arcade machine featured four joysticks, but our example will mix keyboard controls and gamepad inputs. Before we deal with the movement, we’ll need some characters and dungeon graphics. For this example, we can make our dungeon from a large bitmap image and use a collision map to prevent our characters from clipping through walls. We’ll also need graphics for the characters moving in eight different directions. Each direction has three frames of walking animation, which makes a total of 24 frames per character. We can use a Pygame Zero Actor object for each character and add a few extra properties to keep track of direction and the current animation frame. If we put the character Actors in a list, we can loop through the list to check for collisions, move the player, or draw them to the screen.”
Source : RPiF