So I’m in. I haven’t done game development for MONTHS at this rate, due to college. But now it’s finals week! And my only finals are today!
Once I’m done with those, I’ll get back to work on my warmup game. My spark to do more game development was inspired by a project for my CS class where you had to write a basic maze game where you walk to an exit. It was simple, I had no proper input libraries for things like keyboard input so you had to type “left” or “right” or “up” or “down” to navigate, and you could pick up items. There wasn’t any real goal, but it was still extremely fun. After that, I started working on TileEngine again, a project of mine, and made the shader and material framework start working, so I can start doing things (mostly pretty water, hopefully <3), and it just quickly struck me how FUN everything was, even if it was challenging and even if I was having trouble setting uv coords in my vertex shader so my fragment shader was spitting out nonsense. However, unable to fully polish up TileEngine for LD, I started with my warmup game, TSLTRS, from scratch using my old tile-based navigation methods (but with a better camera), and that’s been extremely fun to get working.
The toolset I’m going to use is probably the same as always. Visual Studio for codes, C# and .net3.5 for the runtime environment (I should learn mono…), OpenTK for the making stuff appear on screen, Paint.net for pixels, Photoshop E9 (bundled with my tablet) for anything more fancy if the need arises, and sfxr for the sounds (maybe bfxr if there’s a downloadable version). I’d like to say that I’d try Krita for the more fancy stuff, but I feel the project needs more time to mature, especially under Windows. I’ll probably run the game at a “virtual resolution” of 640×480 like I typically do these days, though I hope to play with the viewport settings some so you can properly upscale the window and everything will be under the right aspect ratio. Another thing I might play with, if I have the time, is using a “mega-texture” for the backgrounds, rather than tiles like I tried in the previous LDs. Tiles are simple, but I hate defining them in code. With TileEngine Tiles only contain texture offset and solidity properties (as well as some misc bits for lighting, etc), and then I just apply textures based on the material data and offsets. With TSLTRS, I intend to make all the layers just one large image, so I can add details without having to concern myself with breaking them into separate 16×16 graphics, or an atlas. (of course, this assumes I’m doing a tile based game in the first place)
But above all, I’m just glad to be back in this “game making” stuff, even if I tend to pull that “oh I’m uncreative” crap every once in a while. Thanks, programming professor for putting up that maze project!
