It was just another day at the bottom of the ocean until an explosion in one of the storage bays cracked the protective dome around Deep Sea Research Lab Alpha. Now the entire place is flooding, and the emergency pump system is a chaotic jumble of loose parts.
This chapter focuses on the following concepts:
- Using the Content Pipeline to load textures from disk
- Creating classes to divide code into logical units
- Recursively evaluating the status of the game board to check for scoring chains
- Drawing textures using the
SpriteBatch.Draw()method - Managing simple game states
The Puzzler has always been a popular game genre. From old standbys like Tetris to modern crazes like Bejeweled, puzzle games are attractive to players because they do not require a long-term time investment or a steep learning curve.
The game mechanic is the heart of any good puzzle game. This mechanic is usually very simple, with perhaps a few twists to keep the players on their toes.
In Flood Control, the player will be faced with a board containing 80 pieces of pipe. Some will be straight pipes and some will be curved. The objective of the game is to rotate the pipes to form a continuous line to pump water from the left side of the board to the right side of the board.
Completing a section of pipe drains water out of the base and scores points for the player, but destroys the pipes used. New pipes will fall into place for the player to begin another row.