Hello everyone,

I am a computer science teacher and in the past years, I noticed that my students have a hard time understanding the concept of computer programming. As I am always on the lookout for great ideas that might help me illustrate what programming is all about, I stumbled upon two flash games by coolio-niato where a small robot has to lit every light within a level. The interaction between the robot and the user is done through a set of "instructions" that the robot follows blindly and which is a fantastic idea to illustrate programming.

You can find both games here:

lightBot1: http://armorgames.com/play/2205/light-bot
lightBot2: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/539621

I am currently working on a new version of lightBot that I'm implementing in HTML5 using canvas. I am currently hard at work implementing the game engine but I am progressing steadily and I am confident that I will have a working alpha version in the next weeks.

You can find a working version here: http://www.haan.lu/lightbot/

Your job, if you'd be interested, would be to create isometric sprites for the robot. The robot can look in four different directions (north-east, north-west, south-east, south-west) and can stand still, walk, jump and light a tile. As I am more the technical type, I would give you full creative freedom for the artistic art-style (it doesn't have to be a robot but it can be anything you want), the size of the sprites as well as the number of frames for each animation. At the moment I have implemented the standing position and the walking animation using two frames only for a walk cycle and mirrored the images for north-east and north-west (as well as south-east and south-west).

You can find an example of my current sprite setup here: http://www.haan.lu/lightbot/img/sprites.png

I am doing the project in my free time for no payment as I think that it is important to have great educational tools in class that better illustrate difficult concepts (and my students are having fun when they are allowed to "play games" in class). I hope to find a similar-minded person that would be willing to contribute his skills to this project. He will of course figure on the website of the game and receive full credit for the game art with a link to his portfolio or email address.

Feel free to reply to this post for further questions or suggestions.

Update 08/05/2011: Added "walk forward" and "light tile" instructions to bot instruction set. Changed placeholder level to something more complex to show possibilities of map engine. Users might need to clear cache (Ctrl + F5) to see new level. Bot "jump" instruction will be implemented next.

Edited by Malorian - 26 September 2011 at 10:04am

Hey,

I think this is a great project. I really hope for more integration of games into education.
Unfortunately it is not entirely within my area of expertise (especially the sprite), but I can do your welcome/help/etc screens if you like.

Just drop me a message at zententia @ gmail .com

What source license is the program using?
If it is copy-left I might be willing to give the spites a go.

As a computer science teacher, my main interest lies in communicating my knowledge to others and especially our children (the next generation). The entire source code will be freely available under copyleft terms. I will make sure to give credit to each and every artist contributing to this project and that everyone interested can use, study, copy/share and modify (four copyleft principles) the source code as he pleases. I am thinking about releasing the entire project under the GNU General Public License.

Edited by Malorian - 13 September 2011 at 2:06am

Just in case your students like the game more then they like programming, be sure to recommend them robocode. One of my favorite games and requires serious programming in Java

I like the concept, looks very promising!

Got the base sprite mostly done. Not sure about the size, It's significantly bigger than the current sprites.

I'll try to get this finished up over the weekend (sorry for the slow pace, it's reminded me why I don't do much iso).



Also I noticed that the tiles aren't quite pixel-isometric (2:1), don't know if that's intentional.


Edited by surt - 23 September 2011 at 6:00am

Another example of this type of game, this is done with pixel art!

http://pleasingfungus.com/

It will probably still need a bit of tweaking, but I'll let you poke it in the game so I can see what needs fixing.
The link to the original sprite is dead, so I hope everything is here.
Walk cycle is: 0, 1, 2, 1

surt, the sprites you created are absolutely incredible! That is fantastic work.

From the image you posted I could easily find out that a sprite has a width of 80px. However, since the image is 232px high, I was a bit unsure about the exact sprite height. From "Jump0" and "TurnOn0" I calculated that a sprite with a height of 100px would fit all the images and that's how I created the sprite image that is currently used in the game: http://www.haan.lu/lightbot/img/sprites2.png

I also updated the current version of the game to include your sprite with some small fixes to the code to have everything display nicely. I also haven't changed the tile size yet ... still waiting for more opinions on the tile/bot ratio.

A few things however:
- I guessed that "Jump0" is for jumps going up and "Jump1" for jumps going down. Looping through the two frames resulted in a "weird" animation.
- The jump animation still looks a bit unnatural. This is mostly because of the code I use to calculate the jump distance: the robot always jumps in a straight line which looks wrong. Additionally, in complex levels my occlusion code fails a bit and parts of the robot are visible/invisible when they shouldn't.
- I wonder if I should change the tile colors to have the robot pop out more. Any suggestions welcome.

Check it out and tell me what you think!

Edited by Malorian - 26 September 2011 at 10:14am

At the moment the tiles are all calculated and drawn with basic shapes and I don't use any images for them. That's also the way I'd like it to stay since it makes the entire process more flexible if I decide to add more tile types.

Currently, I use 7 colors for the level:



1. a normal tile from the top, currently #ffa605
2. a normal tile from the unlit side, currently #e28b00 which is a 10% luminosity difference from color 1
3. a normal tile from the lit side, currently #ffc133 which is a 6% luminosity difference from color 1
4. base color for an unlit light tile, currently #0468fb
5. highlight color for an unlit light tile, currently #4c81ff
6. base color for a lit light tile, currently #e3e500
7. highlight color for a lit light tile, currently #ffff7c

If you'd like, you could just post me the seven color values and I'll pop them in to see what they are like.