The first, and arguably most important, part of creating a game is designing the game. We will, therefore, spend this first part of the tutorial designing the game before we start writing it.

Traffic Jam is based upon a game called Rush Hour where you have a car that is surrounded by many other cars. Your objective is to move the other cars to allow your car to exit the traffic jam. It is played on a 6x6 grid and contains cars which occupy two spaces and trucks which occupy three. We will allow each space on the grid to be 64x64 pixels, which will make a board that is 384x384, which should display on any screen and still allow for some space around the game for the window.

Included with the development of Traffic Jam will be a puzzle editor. After all, whzt good is a puzzle game if you can not create more puzzles? The editor will also allow for specifying how many moves it should take to complete the puzzle. This number would be with the most ideal moves, but will be provided by the creator, not figured by the computer. (Perhaps after a tutorial about AI we can come back and add this, so save your source code!)

The game will be developed entirely in Visual Basic and will use the Windows drawing routines only. DirectX will not be used. We will save DirectX for a later tutorial.

When the game is finished, I will come back and add pictures of the completed product here.