The Game Developer's Guidepost

Your guide to learning game development

Programming Simple 2D Games in D

Game 1: Treasure Grabber

In this project you will create a game where the player controls a treasure hunter. The goal of the game is to help the treasure hunter score points by grabbing treasure. Each time treasure is collected, a new piece is spawned at a random location on the field. Occasionally, rare treasure will spawn which earns more points when collected.

To add some challenge, the player also needs to help the treasure hunter avoid bullets fired from enemy turrets. When hit by a bullet, the treasure hunter loses a block of health. Once all health blocks are lost, the game will end and the player’s highest score earned during the current play session will be displayed. At this point the player can press “Enter” to start the game again.

As the player earns points from grabbing treasure the turrets will begin to fire at a faster rate. Each time the player earns a certain number of points the treasure hunter’s health will be refilled and the turret fire speed will be reset to the default.

Clearly, this is not a very complex game. In fact, this game is written using a relatively small amount of code. However, with this project we will demonstrate techniques that are useful when developing other, more complex, video games. In fact, we’ll use many of these techniques throughout the rest of this series.

The final source code for this project can be downloaded from here and the build scripts can be downloaded from here.