For semester two of the module Games Engine Creation at Level 4 of my Computer Games Programming (BSc) degree at Staffordshire University, I had to recreate part of the functionality of the original Mario Bros. arcade game using only C++ and the SDL2 (Simple Direct-Media Layer) library.
During the project I implementend a variety of features such as:
- Player character movement to input
- Animated characters, player and enemies
- Collectable coins
- Collisions and player / enemy death
- Screen shake
- Screen manager with multiple screens
- Level map read in from file
- Sound manager, with background music and sound effects
- Score manager, with text rendered to the screen
- Functional POW block and Koopas that behave as expected
- Local multiplayer
- Screen scrolling with split screen rendering
My favourite part of the project was tackling the problem of the split screen rendering. And how to handle the merging and splitting of the cameras, along with where to render the textures. Overall I learnt a lot from this project and have found myself more confident in my ability to code gameplay elements from scratch.
