Night Patrol
A top-down stealth game with guard patrols, sightlines, and multi-floor progression.
What You’ll Build
A stealth game where you sneak through a guarded building. Guards walk fixed patrol routes and project visible sightlines — step into one and you’re caught. Collect the objective on each floor, then reach the exit. Five floors, each harder than the last.
Why This Game?
Word Worm stored words in arrays. Night Patrol stores worlds in arrays. Each floor is an 8x16 grid of characters packed into a string array, loaded from DATA statements. Walls, floors, guards, objectives — the entire level lives in data.
This is the first game where an enemy thinks. The guard follows a patrol route, a string of compass directions parsed one character at a time. It’s simple AI, but it creates real tension: watch the pattern, find the gap, move.
What You’ll Learn
- Map data — string arrays as 2D maps, loaded from DATA
- Drawing from data — rendering a map with nested loops
- Wall collision — checking the map array before moving
- Guard patrol AI — route strings parsed character by character
- Counter-based movement — guards move on a tick timer
- Sightlines — extending a line from the guard until hitting a wall
- Detection — player caught in a sightline or by contact
- Lives and reset — restarting positions without redrawing
- Objectives and exits — multi-step win conditions
- Floor progression — loading new levels with RESTORE
- Visual polish — border colours, title screen, detection drama
- Sound design — alarms, fanfares, and atmospheric beeps
Unit Roadmap
Night Patrol
Build the core Night Patrol stealth game mechanics