Ps_ForestPass an attempt an outdoor map in the source engine
2009-10-23
Here’s a map I’m working on for FAS. It attempts to do an outdoor forest scene in Source which is a little rough.
I learned the value of modulation blend textures from this map, the quality increase from using them on your terrain blends is huge. The tree model is about my 4th attempt at doing an evergreen, I’m still not entirely happy with it but it’s improving every time which is good.
As you can see I thought of a better name for the game than “Akumas Quest”
Since the last version I’ve done the following:
-Added in collisions
-Added in an enemy and enemy manager class
-Added in scoring
-Added in a very hacked on FSM for the start menu
I’ve learned a ton from this project. One thing in particular is after starting to pass a lot of classes around it became very apparent why it’s good to make an interface for a class you only have one instance of then register it as a service. I’ve heard this is called the singleton pattern. Definitely seems to keep the code less messy since a lot of my classes need usually one or 2 things from another class.
One other thing to note is next time I do a game, I’ll make sure I have a very well thought finite state machine in place first. Trying to implement a decent FSM after the game was started proved to be too much of a burden.
You may notice there’s some diagnostic text in the top left, it’s telling you what state Akuma is in, whether a collision succeeded and whether the irrelevant enemies were removed from memory.
I still have to add some more gameplay code. The point of the game will be that Akuma must protect his stash of pizza and comics on the left side of the screen from increasingly difficult waves of enemies.
Been a long time since a coding/XNA post : Akuma’s Quest dev video 001
2009-10-15
I’ve spent some free time int he summer studying C# and XNA in preparation for school and just for the fun of game development. Years ago I did some introductory classes in programming at college, mostly in c++. I did well gradewise but all the exercises were about fundementals like making linked lists and pointer management, basically all console programs. I coulnd’t quite grasp how that would come together to form a useful windows program, much less a game.
After getting back into programming through C#/XNA I’ve managed to stay a lot more motivated than before. The language has had the effect of making c++ more understandable. I’m looking forward to really getting into the guts of the SourceSDK eventually.
So I have today some video footage of what is actually my first 2 projects:
The first is LemurLib, a 2D platforming game library that currently handles texture management, cel animation (both snap and linear), input handling, and has a premade protagonist class so you can get a character running in game with only a few lines of code and a textuer.
The second is Akuma’s quest, a personal project full of lifted sprites that promises to be both terrible and blashphemous. In the video you have the basic player character moving around with a teleport for fast movement and 2 attacks. The background is a quick parallax hack that I plan to replace with a well thought out implementation for the library.
One thing I’ve learned from this so far is that I really should have included a play duration parameter when you submit an animation to the animation manager, relying on the animation to just play perfectly without any sort of time comparison doesnt seem to work very well.
