| Liberty BASIC Workshop Tutorial |
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Game Workshop is the quickest, easiest way to get a game started in Liberty BASIC. Games are accomplished with sprites. Sprites are special images that allow you to place characters and items on a background realistically.
GAME BITMAPS
Game Workshop allows you to select images for the game backgrounds and for the sprites. It generates the LOADBMP lists for you when you choose to create code. If you choose the option to scroll the background, you can specify the scroll amount in both the x and the y directions, and Game Workshop creates the scrolling code for you.
SPRITES
Game Workshop allows you to designate sprites with image lists. Just click and drag the bitmap names into the sprite image list.
Sprite properties such as scale, startup location, cycling and orientation can be set by clicking a few buttons.
You can designate one user-controlled sprite per game.
GAME PROPERTIES
You can set the properties for your game easily, too. Game Workshop will add statusbars, keyboard handlers and mouse handlers for you, if you check those options. Your game can be in a regular window, or a popup window with no titlebar.
GWS FILES
You can save the outline of your game to disk so that you can open it and add to it later.
CREATING THE LIBERTY BASIC CODE
You can also choose to create the Liberty BASIC code for the game. The code is a skeleton of a game. If there is a user-controlled sprite, the code is created to move the sprite when the user presses the arrow keys. Collision detection is set up for the user-controlled sprite, or the first sprite in your sprite list, so you can see how to check for collisions among the sprites. The game logic is up to you, though. When two sprites collide, does the score increase? Does one sprite lose a life? It's all up to you, but the outline for the game is in place. You can now work on the fun part!