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The first thing you will notice when you run the program will most likely be how small everything is. I have a fascination with the idea of small games which happened to be buzzing around in my head at the time that I began this project. It turned out to be convenient for me since I am a terrible artist and it's a lot easier to animate a 5x7 pixel character than a more reasonably sized one.
From my point of view the most interesting part of this program was animating the characters. In my past programs the characters have remained mostly static, but this time I wanted the characters to walk around and climb ladders and fall off of ledges and climb out of pits so I needed to do some sort of animation. Again the small size of the graphics helped me out here because I didn't have to worry too much about making the graphics flow smoothly from walking into climbing or anything like that. It is perfectly
acceptable
to snap from any of the walking frames, for instance, to the climbing frames because there isn't enough detail to see whether or not it would really make sense for the character to suddenly be climbing. I'm not sure if I'm explaining myself properly so I'll include a picture which might help.
The other thing that I wanted to do with this program to make it more fun was add multiplayer over TCP/IP. As of this time I have implemented some very basic network code but there is a lot of work to be done before I would consider the network portion of this application to be complete. Additionally, in multiplayer in general, the AI is really bad at considering two players. When there is only one player the bad guys do a fairly good job of hunting you down, but when there are two players they get confused very easily.
