Over the long New Year’s Eve weekend, I started working on a new side project. The goal is to make a clone of New Super Mario Bros DS multiplayer game, “Mario vs Luigi”.
If you’ve never played it, “Mario vs Luigi” is a modernized version of the old-school Mario Bros arcade game. You know, the one with the POW in the middle. The original focuses on timing jumps and projectiles, similar to your modern fast-paced FPS (Quake, Unreal, etc), except in a 2D world. NSMB DS introduces larger, horizontally wrapped maps, and lots of new powerups.
Here’s a video of NSMB DS:
Some games, like Teeworlds, have already proven that two-dimensional games can be competitive, so I believe there is a market for this type of thing. I also think that making it freely available on the web will increase the game’s ‘adoption’ rate.
I’m a lousy game designer, so the idea of cloning New Super Mario Bros. DS’ gameplay relieved me of some of the pressures of that role. For now, I only have to focus on the technical stuff. I do hope that some day, the game will begin to grow organically, and introduce new features and mechanics.
I had a few goals in mind for the weekend:
- Implement smooth user controls and physics (easy)
- Create a horizontal wrapped world (not so easy!)
- Prototype an RTMFP peer-to-peer multiplayer system (unknown)
This SWF doesn’t have the RTMFP component enabled. I managed to get it to work, but it’s not even worth showing without lag compensation. I hope to work on that aspect of the game next.
The avatar can crouch, wall jump, triple jump, stomp, break bricks, and shoot fireballs. The physics are sort of a hybrid between Mario and Meat Boy at the moment. I’m happy with them for now.
Prototype
Here’s the prototype in it’s current state: Click to focus!
If anyone’s interested, I can make a post about the horizontal-wrapping camera.