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2 Movements

In his journey to save the princess, the kid has to endure several levels full of challenging traps and skilled opponents. Run, walk, turn, crouch, jump, hang, climb, take the sword, attack and defend are some of the kid’s movements at the user’s disposal to make his way to the princess tower. Although, this is a relatively large set of movements, basically all these are accomplished by some combination of the directional and shift keys, often conditioned to the current kid’s state. This chapter explains in detail all possible movements of the kid.

There are six modes of movement: normal, crouch, run, hang, fall and fight. The mode the kid is in is the foremost element determining how the input is translated into kid’s movements.

Notice that (whenever it makes sense) for any move, holding its triggering keys continues or repeats the movement.26 Often, when transitioning from a movement to another that share some keys, the user can keep the common keys pressed, as well as any other keys ignored by an intermediate movement, and the kid will just do the right thing. It’s also worth nothing that the kid responds to the input in real time, that is, in the next animation cycle.27

FRONT and BACK are meta-keys used to refer to LEFT and RIGHT conditionally subject to kid’s facing direction. The UP, DOWN, SHIFT and ENTER keys are simply referred as such. The following figure illustrates how these keys appear in a common keyboard.

mininim-figures/keyboard

Footnotes

(26)

That’s not so for the original game, in which for many situations the user have to release and press the keys again to have the movement repeated.

(27)

That’s not so for the original game, in which the kid delays one cycle to respond.


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