Since the last post I…

• Added parallax layer to the starfield background. I’m not sure yet if I’ll keep it, because it’s kinda unrealistic (Assuming the stars are far enough that they’ll appear as points, they would be far enough to not parallax at all and always stay fixed on the same spot.) and also seems to mess up the relative sense of movement of the player. I’ll probably add foreground “space debris” layers that are on a similar plane of movement as the player instead.
• Some internal code refactoring. With more to come. Yay exciting.
• Drones now have shield and hull integrity meters and you can shoot and kill them! Shield recharges and has a nice effect when you hit it. Drones break into space junk when their hull is completely destroyed.

It’s now finally starting to shape into something that could be called “playable”, except without much of a goal or challenge. Because of that, I made a new Windows build, which you can find on the brand new project page, at the bottom. Please try it out!

So classes started. And with that went the whole 1GAM thing. It may be obvious from the lack of updates I haven’t really been working on it lately. I still want to complete my game though, so I’ll march on. But the month-end deadline is busted.

The only new things I did since the last post were adding performance counters (to help trackdown performance hiccups on my laptop) and a fancy procedural starfield background:

Pretty nice huh?

That’s it, I just wanted to post something here, the lack of updates was making me depressed.

Today I spent most of the day travelling, so I didn’t get that much done. I did implement a few things though:

• Camera system. Your view is now always centered on your ship.
• Semi-proper timing. Theoretically the game should run at a more constant speed now, though it shouldn’t make a difference if your VSync was working in the first place.
• And most importantly: Ported the graphics to OpenGL 1.5. Took little effort and should massively increase compatibility.

No screenshot because there aren’t any changes that would be visible on it. Find the latest binary on the project page. I’d be very grateful if you test it and let me know if it works or not via Twitter.

So after about a day of semi-productive work, I have a something implemented of my new game idea. Things I managed to add in this timespan are:

• Rotating player ship with inertial newtonian physics.
• A few dummy spinning enemy drones.
• Shooting bullets and their collision with the drones.

If you want to try it out, binaries can be found on the project page. The source is over at GitHub. Controls for now are arrow keys and X to shoot.

This one has been much quicker to get up to speed due to having the framework from the previous game already in place, though I had to chase a particularly annoying bug in my SpriteBuffer class that didn’t manifest earlier which took me the greater part of yesterday. Frustrating.

I hope to be able to keep making progress at this rate, even though I know it won’t last, specially with my university classes starting back again next week.

Update: People had trouble running it, so I decreased the required OpenGL version to 3.0. This should increase compatibility a bit, specially when I later compile it for other platforms. Download it on the link above.

So I’ve been working on my 1GAM January game since the last week of 2012. The original plan was to create some kind of physics arcade game: gems would rain down and bouncing them off the paddle and against each other would net you points.

Eventually, after several days of developing framework code, learning that rolling your own physics is harder than I thought at first, relaxing by drawing some stuff and doing gamedev-y things, I arrived at a semi-playable version of my idea:

And after playing with it for a while… decided to abandon it. I thought about it for a while, but in the end decided that the gameplay seemed too random due to being so physics based, and I didn’t have any good ideas to tame it either.

Considering my first attempt a failure, I turned to an older idea of mine: a space exploration, combat and trading game. The grand idea is a mixture of dog fighting with RPG elements, enabling upgrading of your spaceship and trading of goods. Given the constraints imposed (with good reason!) by the 1GAM challenge I will obviously not be able to execute the whole idea, so I will focus on the combat aspects for now. Hopefully by the end of the month (or a bit later) I should have a decent “space brawler”, if you will.

• 2013-02-07 - 1GAM - Blow up stuff!
• 2013-02-04 - 1GAM - I knew this wouldn't work
• 2013-01-10 - 1GAM - Day 4
• 2013-01-09 - 1GAM - Day 3
• 2013-01-07 - 1GAM - Day N+1
• 2013-01-07 - Hello World!