voidskimmer 2014 11 24

Doing some interesting and complicated things with a rendertarget2d.

Planning development for voidskimmer.

So I have written two demos for void skimmer. One that demonstrates ship movement, and one that demonstrates the parallax effect by projecting the game field onto a cylinder. Now it's time to actually sit down and write the game.

Up until now I've been able to get away with using scalars or simple objects, but I want to be easily able to scale the game into something larger. I don't want to write my own engine, but I need to find a way to make certain things extensible.




I think that with the game I am working on, it would be nearly impossible to develop as an MVC style application. The coupling is simply to tight.

So let's take a look at the game objects to get a better idea of what design pattern to use.

So far, we have a playfield and a space ship.

A play field has dimensions, a background image, physics, gravity, objects, etc.

A space ship is an object, it has a position, velocity, and a heading, it has a sprite, fuel, health, etc.

Now here is an interesting question. Is a play-field a level, or does a level merely populate a level? What conditions cause you to change levels? How do you manipulate the space ship object?

How are objects drawn? Do space ships draw themselves? Does the play-field draw the space ship? Does the game object draw all the game elements?

Is a game object just a game object, and the play-field does all the controlling, or will a space ship object inherit from a base game object?

There are two things I want to avoid in designing this game. Over abstraction, and over complication. I don't have an existing code base to work off of, and no team mates to code it with me, so having large complicated objects just slows things down.

voidskimmer 2014 11 22

This game is very much me cobbling together pieces as I can find time to. Today I got a very basic carousel working that the actual game will be projected on. The next video should hopefully combine the two concepts.

Void Skimmer update

Just another update on the progress of my tiny game that I'm working on.

It's coming along pretty nicely. One thing I would like to do is have a repeating background instead of just clamping the edges. If you were on the bottom of the play area shooting down, and somebody was on the top of the play area, the person on top would get obliterated hands down, because they wouldn't see the enemy or the shots coming. I think this is what I will work on adding next.

I may need to switch how I am doing the drawing though. Right now I am drawing everything twice. I am drawing the ship, the background, and all the active game objects to a reserve render target. This gives me resolution independence and the ability to do some post effects on the game screen. Sepia when paused, shake the screen when a player dies, scale the camera to encompass two players, etc.

But the problem is when things go outside the play area. The default behavior is to clamp, but I need it to repeat. 

The next thing I would like to work on is adding black hole gravity wells for your ship to encounter.

Void Skimmer Video 1

A small demo of just some simple movement mechanics that I've been working on, and getting familiar with Monogame.

It's a great library, and I'll definitely write some more about it when I have more to say about it :p

Playing around with monogame

Been playing around with monogame a little bit. Have to say, pretty impressed with how easy it is to get something on the screen.

Coincidentally, been having a lot of fun playing luftrausers on PS3 this weekend too.

Some old programming videos I made

At some point I should probably post more videos.

Catching up

Wow, it's been a while since I have posted anything cool to my blog. Right around a year actually. I think it's time to fix that. I have been doing some neat stuff like building my own software renderer and building some quake levels. Those videos are on youtube, so I will have to cross post them here.

Another cool project that I have dabbled with is creating a play-station as a service setup. Using a TV tuner card, NGinx, and a few other pieces of software, I can effectively play playstation from any device in the house (as long as I bring my controller with).

I think between that and cataloguing what I have been learning about Linux and web programming lately, there will be some pretty neat stuff coming in the year 2015.


So, the most recent thing I've done is convert my PC from running windows 7/8 to running Ubuntu full time. What a transition! I'm not sure I will stick with it, but Gnome throwback is making it a lot easier, and so is having almost half my steam library available.

Being able to play TF2 and Civ V makes me a very happy panda. In the future I may add a 3rd hdd for dual booting, but for right now, things are great.