Didn’t want to do the same title as everyone else, so decided to translate “I am going to participate” to latin in Google translate… It’s kind of awesome, to be honest…

Anyway, same drill as always.. C++ with DX for graphics and FMOD for audio, through use of a small framework I’ve built on in previous competitions (nothing game related, just some helpful functions):

My framework just features:

• D3D9 initialization and some helpers
• FMOD interface for sound
• 2d Sprites
• 2d Particle System (extended the old one, now supports different colors through the lifetime of the particle)
• Text (now working in full screen!)
• 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.
• Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)
• Simple 3d camera handling system (just look at operation)
• XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me… the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I’m too lazy to figure out how they work)
• 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)
• 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)
• LUA library support (it’s actually ripped from my engine, so it’s a good support system for LUA)… Want to try scripting tutorial and cutscenes…
• DDS image loading for an offscreen buffer (just supports R8G8B8A8 images) – probably going to use it for map design (instead of the usual text file thing)

On the tools side:

• Visual Studio 2005 (hope I can get used to it again, been using 2010 at work)
• Photoshop CS5 (for 2d graphics and textures if I decide to adventure into 3d, and for map creation, etc)
• 3d Studio Max (for modelling if I go 3d, or for title screens and such otherwise)
• sfxr (or Bfxr) (for audio effects)
• Wolfram Tones (for the music creation – fun tool, saves loads of time) and MIDI Converter Free (to convert the MIDI generated by Wolfram Tones to OGG)

The themes don’t look very promising this time, to be honest… loads of them seem like they’ll just spawn the same game over and over again from different people, but I’m just a grumpy old coder…

Anyway, very excited, haven’t done a single line of game code for ages, need to get that out of my system to go back to the real (boring albeit well-paying) world…

Good luck everyone!