2D Arcade Games

Hi everyone,

I'm interested in making an arcade style game with a HUD that takes over the player's screen and is controlled by the player's movement keys. Does anyone know of anything like that that already exists or has anyone made something similar in the past?

I'm thinking of old pac-man, space invaders era games for the style of graphics, the game play would be much simpler, maybe just left and right controls? Is there some trick to making these sorts of games ro would you have to model the graphics as prims with minimum depth?

I'd be really interested in talking to people who have coded something like this or could offer any help in the process. Your help would be much appreciated...


Thanks in advance,

John

John I've never really seen this done. Most I've seen is arcade prims that just open a flash game in the web browser.

Someone did a pacman clone in world (rather than on a hud) for burning life 05. I think it was called "blingman" or something like that.

There is also a version of space invaders inworld, I think it was called Prim Invaders or somesuch.

I've been working on something like this, and have a few alphas of turret defense style games.

the issue with 2d games is that, even once you've found a way to restrict yourself to 2 dimensions of movement, the physics in second life really hates very small/slow movements. So far my smallest sized screen is 3mx3m. one of the tricks I've found is rezzing your objects so that they are already physical partially penetrating your screen. this will prevent drifting on your 3rd dimension, and will cause a collision event to occur when the pieces go off the board, making for a handy way to have them die at the edge.

I've managed to develop a system that knows exactly where on the face of a prim you've clicked, and am working on a game where the board calculates the positions of all the enemies and then issues commands to them facilitating non-physical movement. the player places pieces on the board and the board will issue commands to the pieces as well, calculating their non-physical movement. This should allow me to have a screen of around 1mx1m and still look relatively smooth with the various movements on the screen.

Im starting to perform some tests in the "2D" game field. So far, I made a game in wich two peoples sits in front of a screen, goes mouselook and the screen shows random positionated targets. The players must touch the center of the targets in order to win points, the one that has accumulated more point wins the match.
Its simple but it shows me that lag is a important fact in this kind of games becose little things changing places, dissapearing, rezzing, playing sounds, etc its a dificult thing to archieve in places with to much people or to many scripted objects running.
Is something else to put in consideration for the chosen game´s dynamics.