Letter for Mimi 2 – wip #2

A major design-flaw in my previous games was that the content was not separated from the game-engine. Even in my Flixel Adventure Game Tutorial you can see that apart from the map, all content is hard-coded. My plan for this new game is to put all content into an XML file that is embedded in the game. This has another big advantage: I will be able to make a world-editor in which I can generate an XML containing the game.

Separating content from game-engine translates into the following for the animated water tiles in my previous post.

<animatedTiles>
    <animatedTile>
        <tileImageId>4</tileImageId>
        <tileImageId>5</tileImageId>
    </animatedTile>
</animatedTiles>

Using such an XML allows me to make multiple instances of the world, for example the interior of buildings will no longer be placed in the same map as the overworld. I have not figured out the exact format for the doors (called links below) yet, but it will look something like this:

<worlds>
    <world id="interior_house_1">
        <!-- ... -->
        <links>
            <!-- link to 'village' world -->
        </links>
    </world>
    <world id="village">
        <!-- ... -->
        <links>
            <!-- link to 'interior_house_1' world -->
        </links>
    </world>
</worlds>