Dungeon Dregs -- necessary changes

Creating the dungeon

First of all, there are the two methods loadMap() and resetMap(). The former is currently empty. It's supposed to, I presume, load an array of integer data corresponding to the full dungeon layout, over the network. That's only done once, during initialization.

The latter is meant to copy that data into the dungeon array map, once before each game session, so the player always starts from a "fresh" dungeon (with no broken doors or escaped prisoners). In my test applet, resetMap() just fills map with data from a couple of constant arrays.

During a session

The variable gameState (see the variable information page) tells the main loop what to do depending on its value. My test applet has plenty of "dummy" implementations of things like the introduction screen, the after-death screen, the run-out-of-time screen, etc. The code for that should be inserted in the corresponding places in the switch(gameState) statement in the run() method. Just don't touch cases 0 (preparing game session), 1 (running game) and 6 (the player death scene). I've used the convention that if there are some major screen changes, one value does the proper drawing and then lets another value take over. For example:

	case 9: // Initialize presentation
		nearBG.setColor(Color.black);
		nearBG.fillRect(0,0,screenX*blockSize,screenY*blockSize+
		   topMargin);
		nearBG.setColor(Color.white);
		nearBG.drawString("Press SPACE to start",160,100);
		gameState=10;
		break;
					
	case 10: // Presentation screen -- wait for SPACE
		if (pressedKey==32)
			gameState=0;
		break;

gameState 9 clears the screen and writes the text "Press SPACE to start". Then it changes itself to 10, which in the next loop iteration means waiting and listening for the SPACE key to be pressed, and if so change to state 0, which will then prepare for a game session.

Timers and counters

I decided against using constants for tweaking and tuning this part, since I didn't know if the customer would accept a simple red-and-yellow rectangle for displaying the remaining time. I assumed they'd want to replace it with something a little more in style with the rest of the graphics.

The method resetGame() contains one section of code for drawing the necessary things at the top of the screen. It currently looks like this:

	// Timer and saved prisoner counter
	nearBG.setColor(Color.white);
	nearBG.drawString("Time:",2,12);
	nearBG.drawString("Prisoners saved:",310,12);
	nearBG.drawRect(45,3,250,9);
	nearBG.setColor(Color.yellow);
	nearBG.fillRect(47,5,247,6);
	nearBG.setColor(Color.red);
	nearBG.fillRect(47,5,50,6);

Most of it will need to be replaced, I suspect. Later on, the run() method contains this code section for updating the timer bar:

	i=(247*timer)/timeLimit; // Update timer bar
	if (i!=lastTimer)
	{
		lastTimer=i;
		nearBG.setColor(Color.black);
		nearBG.fillRect(47+lastTimer,5,2,6);
	}

It checks if the pixel length of the timer bar has changed since the last game loop. If so, it "nibbles away" one more little part at the right end of it. (The figure 247 is the current initial (maximum) length of the timer bar.)

Sounds and extra graphics

Well, I put in a currently empty method called loadSounds() to make sound implementation easier. But since I don't know what sort of sounds the game should include, I wouldn't know where and when to activate them. The programmers will have to determine that on their own, by studying the comments in the code.

I'd suggest modifying the method loadGraphics() so that it loads an additional graphics file containing a proper logo and other things that will make the game more interesting.