Playing on divided screen? What do you think?

[enker]

I'm making a 2D platform game. This games is basically this:

Two players shooting each other (Multiplayer game, the two players using the same keyboard). There are weapons, items, etc.. for making it more fun.

My question is: Would it be better to use a divided screen (Player1/Player2)? or would it be better to use a whole screen?

If I use a divided screen, my scenarios could be bigger and could have more stuff. But it would be harder to make.

If I use the none divided screen, then it would be a piece of cake to make, but hte scenario would be to short. And with a short scenario the game will be "kill or survive" (which means no choice of escaping the battle to get better weapons, and items).

Any suggestion will be very usefull!

[Avatar]

Your question depends on how you want to make your game ... As you said, making a split screen would allow larger scenes but would be more difficult to program.

Personnally, I would prefer to make a split screen system, because of "flexibility" since you could have bigger maps, and so on, more possibilities (If you make a map editor)

[WILL]

Hmm... well I'd need to understand how you were planning the gameplay design a bit better to fully understand how it may be effected. But if I am assuming it's something of a multi-area platform game then I'd personally like to have the split screen if you are going head to head against another player. It would allow me to get away from him and restock ammo, weapons or power-ups should I need to get some kind advantage over him to win. It'd have more possibilities to be more dynamic I think.

Best of luck with your project planning! :)

[Crisp_N_Dry]

Like the other guys I'd go with split screen. But only if you know you are capable of the task. Too many times I have not finished a game because I've set my sights too high. But if you think you can do it then go for it. Split screen can offer up some fantastic gaming if done right. One of my favourite games was a splitscreen (Vertical) game on the Amiga called Knights. With a piece of cardboard down the middle of the screen me and my best mate would play for hours with no idea where the other guy was, it made for some fantastic gameplay. Those were the days. Anyway, look forward to seeing some screens. Good luck.

[enker]

First, sorry for taking so long to answer, and thanks for the ideas.

I have already made this kind of game, I'm just making a new version (With a complete new engine, and better program practices). This games ideas are very simple:

Two robots shooting each other.
Lots of weapons with secondary functions.
Items for energy recovery.
Some kind of "helpers" that you can call once.
Some kind of "neutral enemies" that attack the two players.

The older version was whole screen, so I decided to make it better. My problem is that I haven't figured out how to have track of the complete scenario and all the stuff that is offscreen. I know that it will take me like a week to find some way, so I'm looking for some your ideas. As far as now, you are beggining to convince me to make the game with divided screen.

I only need some motivation from you and I'll get started with that soon. (Because yesterday I finished the animation engine!).

pd. Thanks for the luck WILL, I really need it! :)

[WILL]

The older version was whole screen, so I decided to make it better. My problem is that I haven't figured out how to have track of the complete scenario and all the stuff that is offscreen. I know that it will take me like a week to find some way, so I'm looking for some your ideas. As far as now, you are beggining to convince me to make the game with divided screen.

My personal game project(a birds-eye view space shooter with a huge map that you explore in each mission) does just this. Basically you want to keep everything based on world values. So basically worldX and worldY are not screenX or screenY(for example sake). When drawing for each player you would simply draw the screen based on the screen size and the offset of the player's location on the actual screen.

ScreenX := PlayerScreenPosX + (BallX - Player[1].X);
ScreenY := PlayerScreenPosY + (BallY - Player[1].Y);

drawpixel(ScreenX, ScreenY, BallColor);

as an example of how you calculate the offsets. PlayerScreenPosX and PlayerScreenPosY are the location of 'your' player from the top-left of the screen. BallX and BallY are the object that your player sees and contains the world co-ordinate values. Player[1].X and Player[1].Y is you and contains world values aswell. Everything must be draw like this. The rest is just calculating everything off of world values. if you have different areas(can be ongoing while other players are in other different areas themselves) you can base each location value off of that area's 'world' offset, just obviously keep track of what area each player or object is in. A table of active areas might help out aswell. Great place to store map data if it exsits too.