Super Mario Bros. 3 Remake

Mario 3 requires no introduction from me with the game being a classic however, I made my own version using C++ and SDL for a module at my university. To the right here is a video of my version of the game.

To use a tile map system, I used software called "Tiled" to create them, I had two layers one for traditional tiles (blocks, coins, powerup blocks, etc) and one for enemies and the player spawn. Using this external software allowed me to create and edit levels very quickly. However, I needed to develop a method of loading them into my game's memory myself. To do this I exported the levels as TMJ files and used the "nlohmann" library to access and read them. Once the map file is loaded, we analyse each tile based on the integer at the coordinate to place the corresponding block and give it any required attributes, such as containing a fire flower, being semi-solid (only has top collision for example), or being breakable. This approach also made it very easy to add tiles to the game as all I had to do was add the new tile ID and its attributes to the function used for analysis. It would now have functionality instead of being shown as a generic tile that is completely static and solid, they would be like this by default as I stored all the tile assets in a single PNG file which saved memory as the tile map class would store the image once instead of each tile storing its image.