The Incredible Wizard of Wor

[Work in Progress] - Milestone 3 Build

Controls

Use the following keys to control the build (you may need to click on the game first to take control):

Source Code & Docs

All code is licensed under the Apache License. Written in Adobe Flash CS4 with Actionscript 3.0.

Source Code | Source Documentation

Background

"In a post-apocalyptic world, one man has resurrected the arcane arts of magic, long thought to be nothing more than a fairy tale. The world grew fearful of the wizard's lust for power so they elected two squadrons of fighters known as Worriors to launch a strike against the wizard and end his reign of terror. The plan was simple: Enter the Wizard's domain through an entrance to his underground dungeon and surprise him. Little did the squadrons know that the Wizard enchanted his dungeons with a spell that forced inhabitants to wander through its corridors forever. Then he populated it with horrible creatures of his own creation. The Worriors must now fight for their lives. And stay alive for as long as possible in the dungeon of a mad man."

The original Wizard of Wor is a 1980 arcade game developed by Midway Games; an action-oriented top-down maze shooter. The player character (The Worrior), armed with a laser rifle, must traverse various dungeons, killing off the Wizard's creations in an attempt to drive the Wizard out of hiding, but even a successful hit on the Wizard will fail to do him in, and he will return to his fortress to heal up for the next encounter.

Enemies

• Burwors are the first enemy encountered. Burwors are stupid; they simply wander around aimlessly and never pursue the player, however, the Burwors will shoot at players if the opportunity arises.
• Garwors are the second enemy encountered. Garwors persue the nearest player by taking the shortest path to that player (breadth-first search). To provide an element of randomness and to prevent camping by the player, the Garwor has a chance to abandon the pursuit of the player and instead move to a random cell. This chance is called the idiot factor (you’d have to be an idiot to stop pursuing the player if you already know where he is). An Garwor will not pursue the player again until it has reached its random destination.
• Thorwors are the third enemy encountered. Thorwors follow the same AI logic as Garwors, but with a lower idiot factor
• The Worluk is the miniboss. The Worluk is encountered after all normal enemies have been eliminated (Max of 6 of each: Burwor, Garwor, Thorwor). The Worluk AI is based off of the Burwor AI in that the Worluk does not actively pursue the player nor care about finding the player. The Worluk simply wanders the dungeon aimlessly until it traverses a portal, at which point, it escapes and is destroyed. Worluks do not shoot projectiles.
• The Wizard is the main boss of the game. The wizard only appears after the death of the Worluk, and only after some rounds. It uses the base AI defined by the Enemy class with an idiot factor of 1%. The Wizard appears after the death of the Worluk, moves toward the nearest player while blindly fireing lasers in the direction it’s facing. After the appear sound has finished playing, the wizard temporarily disappears from the dungone, and then reappears in a different cell. The timing of appearing and vanishing is dictacted by sound events. If the Wizard kills all the players on the board, he is destroyed and deemed to have escaped, ending the level. If the Wizard is killed, the level is ended.

Project Overview

"The Incredible Wizard of Wor" is a game development project I undertook as a learning experience. The project's goal was to recreate a faithful clone of the Wizard of Wor port for Balley Astrocade: "The Incredible Wizard". Balley Astrocade was the first video game console I ever played with, giving me fond memories of spending countless hours in front of a tube TV playing Astrocade variants of all the classics: Space Invaders, Breakout, Galaxian, Space Fortress, and (of course) The Incredible Wizard.

I chose to start with a clone of a classic arcade game for the following reasons:

• The games were artistically simple: complex grahpics and rendering techniques are not required. The project is to help me develop my skills as a programmer, not an artist. The retro style is something that can be easily recreated visually (what my artist friends call "programmer art"), yet still retain the requirements of simple animation techniques, AI, collision detection, etc.
• The games are already complete: Time does not need to be spent thinking of gameplay issues, balance, etc. Time can instead be spent on the programming challenges of meeting already defined requirements, instead of thinking up and experimenting with said requirements.
• The games have small scale demands of modern day problems: the games provide a good way of establishing the ground work of modern day game logic: collision detection, scene graphs, pathfinding, rudimentry artificial intelligence, sound, "flow", etc.

When looking for an original game to clone I immediately looked to the Bally Astrocade, and after considering the many games of the system, I chose The Incredible Wizard to be my first clone; the gameplay mechanics met all of my project requirements and seemed difficult enough to provide a fun challenge, yet simple enough that it could be completed. The game is developed in Adobe Flash CS4 and makes extensive use of the Object-Oriented properties of ActionScript 3.0. Flash was chosen as the platform due to its distribution, compatability, and for the plain and simple fact that Flash makes drawing and animating sprites easy, which would allow more time to be spent on the design of the program structure.

The project is currently past Milestone 3, which is the last milestone build before release. All of the gameplay logic is complete. All that is left to do is the game flow: intelligent spawning of enemies, level progression, menus, enemy movement speed variations, etc.

Mumbo Jumbo

Project and code by Richard Zurad. Based on the original arcade game "Wizard of Wor" by Midway Games. All code is licensed under the Apache License.