Centipede-RS Dev Log #1

A rather rambling design document for my ideas for a Centipede clone that I’m releasing under the MIT license. Following all my reading in Rust it seems like a good idea to have some kind of project to complete. After scrounging about for ideas, I came up with the one of doing an open source centipede clone using Piston. This would be good practice for trying a Rust Ludum Dare next April.

The following is more or less a rambling stream of consciousness design doc for what I’m about to do. I’ll probably follow this up with a series of other entries about the steps and break down of the code as I go.

Concept

A Centipede clone done in Rust using Piston with perhaps some additional flavor.

The core idea of the game is to have a gridded window of size X and Y with a centipede that begins with one segment that grows as the game progresses. The centipede moves continuously in the last cardinal direction specified by the player. As the character moves it encounters various items randomly populated on the screen. Upon contact some effect occurs such as adding an additional segment. If the user comes into contact with itself (such as looping back around on it’s own tail). The game ends or some failure condition occurs.

Objects in the Game

The Game

Well of course it’s an object unto itself. The game represents the game loop.

The Board

The board is 800x480 and divided into 32 pixel squares. At start of the game and at a fixed interval actors are randomly assigned squares on the board.

Centipede

The centipede has the following characteristics:

• Collection of Segments
• Who each have a position and sprite
• Who each have a direction (Each moves in the direction of the segment before it except the head segment which moves in the last direction input by the player).
• If a segment intercepts another segment it destroys it. The severed segment then becomes bombs.
• Number of mushrooms eaten (Used as a score)

Actors

Actors specifies an indescriminate number of items placed on the board that the centipede interacts with when it comes into contact with them. The actors need to be able to expand to include new actors with new effects.

• Sprite
• Board position
• An affect

Right now we have two actors: mushrooms and bombs. Mushrooms are placed randomly on the board at a fixed interval. Bombs are segments that have seperated from the centipede. They each have an affect. Mushrooms cause a new segment to be added to the centipede after X mushrooms have been consumed. Bombs cause the game to immediately end.