RiverMan Media

The Scripted Event System has saved me more time than any other idea I've ever had as a game programmer. We use it everywhere. It controls cinemas, runs AIs, executes visual effects, creates complicated character animations, and much more. By itself, it is a powerful and flexible system, but its true strength comes from how it works in conjunction with the Behavior System and Robot Functions.

Early on in the development of MadStone, we thought it would be cool if the play field looked like a castle wall made of stone blocks. There should be blocks of different sizes and shapes, and all of the blocks should look like they fit together, no matter what shape the overall structure took on.

Sounds easy enough, right? If MadStone was built in a 3d engine, this would have been done for us, but MadStone is entirely a 2D game. The challenge here was making a set of completely 2d blocks look like they fit together in 3 dimensions.

Random Not Fair Enough?

When you break blocks in MadStone, new blocks fall from the top of the screen, as if you are chipping away at an infinitely tall structure. During MadStone’s early days as a crude prototype (free download available soon), the game generated new blocks and MadStones by picking one randomly based on a set of ratios. For example, you might get a 1x1 block as your next block 20% of the time, a MadStone 10% of the time, etc.