MixUp—A Simple Engine

Up to this point, we've gone through many examples of different aspects of game development. Now, let's pull them together to create a simple game from start to finish. In this chapter, we will discuss how to create a basic image scramble game that we'll call MixUp. This is a popular type of puzzle game, in which an image is broken into rectangles on a grid and reshuffled. Players must click on these “pieces” to interchange their positions and, ultimately, restore the original image. The difficulty of these puzzles is a combination of the number and size of the rectangles the image is broken into and the amount of detail in the imagery. We'll create an engine that will use and support any resolution of source image (within reason and memory restrictions) and divide it, dynamically, into any number of grid rectangles. We'll then see how this basic engine can be easily extended to support other source images like video or a live camera feed. Let's get started!