Beethro’s Adventure is the largest and most complex project I’ve worked on so far. The game is a clone of the popular PC game Deadly Rooms of Death by Caravel Games. My brother and I spent a few months writing the game from scratch. He wrote a Windows-based tool that allowed us to have a sophisticated pipeline to quickly prototype and test levels. We spent a while wringing out needless bits from our custom level file format, which in the end hurt us a little. Since we were writing data on the bit level we ran into endian differences between the C++ tool and the Java game engine. After that important lesson we were able to make our level files work flawlessly, all while being around 8-24 kb per level. The level creator was also used to create a menu where the main character fights off an endless horde of enemies all ran by the game engine rather than a static movie.

While writing the game engine I had the opportunity to design some really cool features. Tar babies that spawned from tar mothers under specific conditions (using a flood-fill type check), falling tiles and other animated tiles, simple dynamic lighting for when destructible walls were destroyed, unique enemy AIs, dynamic level loading from an SD card or over the cell network (allowing for expansion packs to be quickly deployed), and more. One of the most rewarding features was one that I put in due to a few rumors I heard during development. I made every effort to make the game engine completely resolution-agnostic, it paid off as a higher resolution device was released a month or so later. Simply dropping in the new art assets and building against a new library produced a perfect hi-res version!

Resolution comparision:

Low res (240x160) vs High res (320x240)

All rooms of all 9 maps that shipped with Beethro’s Adventure. Each room is 16x16 tiles