The Sea Game. Simon’s First Own Game.

Simon created his very first video game completely on his own. Everything in this game he came up with by himself – from the original idea and design to the final code. The game is about a little man (actually, Simon himself) jumping over the waves in the sea. Every time he lands on an actual wave it’s game over.

Simon used collision detection (point-rectangle instead of rectangle-circle collision detection) and array lists to duplicate the waves. He created an illusion of 3D by choosing the viewing angle “almost as if it were an orthographic camera”, he explains.

The code for this game (in Processing i.e. Java) is available on GitHub at

https://github.com/simon-tiger/video-games

The making of, step by step:

Simon had trouble with the game over function. Originally, it was only triggered once the player clicked the mouse to jump again while on a wave, instead of reading to the circle-rectangle (little man-wave) collision. Simon asked about this problem in the Coding Train slack channel and got some great responses. Eventually he solved the problem is his own way (see the “Debugged” video):