Week update – School Madness

Well not real madness, but the name of the project is “School Madness".

The project

I haven’t really talked about the school project I’m working on. To complete my school we have to take certain tests at the end of the year. But we also have to create a “product” that has to do with our education. Since I’m learning for a computer technician (translated) and we are doing different programming things in school I decided to create a game. It’s something I’m best at and it suits me. I probably have one of the most ambitious projects in our class. The standard also isn’t very high and so creating a simple game out of pure C++ using many different libraries (SDL, OpenGL, Freetype, FTGL, irrKlang) is way (waaaaaaaay) above it. So I’m not concerned by the fact that the game is really simple platformer. But I’m still trying to do my best.

The projects is really organized with much emphasis on OOP (Object Oriented Programming) and using the languages more complex features everywhere. I’m also writing short comments everywhere on my mentors request and so that if I will need to discuss the code I will immediately know what is where.

 

(A screen of the current project running)

Edit the level editor

Currently most of the work is going into the level editor. I’m making it user friendly and easy to use. I’m planning on making it the bigger thing in the game promoting creating your own levels. And I think it will be more fun than the simple platforming game. It’s clearly the best level editor I made so far with easy to create levels, test them, and saving/loading works from in-game.

Here you can see the editor menu opened up. By clicking Save/Load Level a “menu” pops up where you input the name of the level. It works really well and it’s the first time I done text input in a game.The red boxes around the objects are collision boxes. It adds a fancy/technical look to the editor.

I still have to add a camera to the editor and some more objects like the player spawn and exit. I will make the rooms a fixed size so that level creators can’t go crazy with it. After that is done I will focus on the actual platforming part of the game. I still think I have to add some kind of power to the player so that is adds some challenge to the game. I think that a double jump will do which the player will then use to do some of the more tricky moves. That way the game won’t be too boring because I’m not planning on adding enemies or moving (deadly) objects.

And that is all about the project for this post.

I have been sick in the last few days and wasn’t really able to do much. I have been learning some 3D modeling with Blender and it’s really interesting. Maybe in the future you will see some low poly models on this blog. But don’t expect any 3D games  

I also thought about starting to make video logs. Nothing complicated just a 1-5 minute video where I show you what I’m currently working on. For example on this post: I would show the code a little and how it’s structured, then I would run the game and show some of the features of the level editor and maybe run the player animation. Really simple. I think it would make a really nice addition and it wouldn’t take me much time to make them since I would make them totally spontaneously with no real goal. Fellow YouTube subscribers might appreciate new videos. Please give me some opinions about this idea in the comments. 

If you don’t know what I’m talking about here is a video log from Chevy Ray Johnston (An awesome indie game programmer/designer). If you can’t see the video click on the empty space and it should pop out.

Hollow's Deep - Ledge Grab & Tile Stitching from Chevy Ray Johnston on Vimeo.

Thanks for reading.