Designing the Game

It's Over!

2005-05-13T18:30:00.000-05:00

Well, it's over. We did it. And, surprisingly, it turned out pretty damn good. It was fun; at least everyone who played it during the showcase seemed to think so. So yay. There are still some speed issues and a few more things to tweak, which I'm going to fix next week. When those tweaks are done, I'll release PvN: The Better Edition. Which will be better. Yes.

Thanks for the semester and all the hard work, guys. We did good.

~Will out.

sigh

2005-05-02T03:32:00.000-05:00

Worst semester ever. I have never worked so much on a single project neglecting everything else in my life. I have become PVN. I know 95% of the code by heart; i could recite it. I can tell you why each line of code is there. I lose it all the time and start laughing for no reason. I have constant insomnia and dejavu. I fear thinking about my health and its deterioration.

one more week... we can do it.

this wasn't a joke

stats

2005-05-02T01:38:00.000-05:00

I found our code stats interesting and thought it would be interesting to share them with the rest of the world.

We have 118 source files in our project, not including the map and configuration files. They total 289kb of disc space.

We have a total of 10511 lines.
- Code only: 7955 75.7%
- Code + Comment: 291 2.8%
- Comment Only: 881 8.4%
- Empty: 1384 13.2%

Damn....

Story: Kids Love It, Parents Burn in Homemade Napalm

2005-04-26T14:31:00.000-05:00

I just sent an email out to the team about our need to develop a real, explicit narrative for the game and implement along with our levels in the coming days.

Thus far, we have largely ignored the actual story and narrative that would push our game along. This is bad: story is good. So we need to do this.

There are still two technical holes to be filled before cutscenes are viable (script player ai trigger and message displayer), but mostly we just need to decide what we want to do and when. I'm happy to write copy for the cutscenes, Ethan can make sure the level designs are agreeable with the cutscenes we want to script, Siz can be the Fearless Leader he's supposed to be, Eugene can write player script ais, and Hugh can help us make it cool. Bosses might also need to do cool things for cutscenes, so, Hugh, let us know what we can do with that and what kinds of things you think would be cool.

i iz happy

2005-04-24T18:08:00.000-05:00

Joy

So we definitly have done a considerable amount of useful work over the weekend. I am happy that we all got toghether and worked on this game. There's a considerable amount of work left, but I think that was long as we work on it consitently and without waiting for to the last minute, we should be fine. I think that the key is to avoid 20 hours marathons at CSUG until 11am in the morning. Other than being absurd and unhealthy, it puts the morale waaay down low where we don't want it. And at this point, that's the last thing we want. People should be happy and not overworked, although, I can speak for myself and the fact that my other classes are killing me. I told a friend about last weekend's marathon sessions for this course and project. His response? "What about your other classes???" Mr. Obvious says: Overworking yourself is bad.

Presenting our game

The presentation is coming up. I see the presentation as the perfect spot for us to show everyone what we're capable of doing. Embarassing as it is, we have no delievered as well as we could have during the semester. Our goal for the presentation should be to show the audience that we worked on this game hard, which we have, and that we have completed a very playable game that should provide a very fun experience. This should strech into the showcase and everyone should say "holy shit. pvn is fuckin awesome."

The progress and more design issues

2005-04-24T14:35:00.000-05:00

Levels

There's been something that I have been thinking of for quite a while, that I didn't want to trouble us with, considering our slow initial progress. In a lot of games that I have played, I remember that one of the best things was the interactivity with the levels. Climbing, stepping, bouncing, etc. Level design is of high priority for us, and with the advancement of our level code, I'd say we're ready for something nice. We have to consider that levels are a world themselves. They are alive. They are not static. This being said, I asked Will if there's an easy way in which, given the current level code, we can add moving parts to levels. The response: yes. Awesome. For the final version, look forward to waving flags, moving windmills in the ninja town (i hope), and other animations.

Enemies

Given a game of our scope, how do we create various enemies that could add a nice dimension to the game? It is quite a difficult question to answer. But we decided from the begining that the way our enemies will stand out is not their dramatic visual difference, but their AI. The enemies, are in essence, the same as our characters. However, each type specializes in a different skill. Pirates and Nnjas. There's aggresive pirates and ninjas. There's defensive pirates and ninjas. There's suicidal pirates and ninjas. Visually, we used the Adobe Photoshop suite and ran our character images through some filters. That has resulted in some pretty interesting images, which I think we could still work on. But overall, I'm very satisfied with them.

another weekend? you know it!

2005-04-22T22:28:00.000-05:00

Yes. Tomorrow from noon-midnight, CSUG. Sunday from noon-2am, CSUG. Productive weekend? I think so. We're going to tweaking AI, adding more enemies, setting up the levels, enemies, bosses, items, etc. It should be a lot of... fun. ;)

banging my head against the wall

2005-04-21T20:04:00.000-05:00

Here's an interesting situation. Will has source. Will has configuration files. Will has most recent version. Will sends most recent version out. Szymon compiles Will's code. Szymon unzips all of the content files into their proper directories. Szymon builds successfully. Szymon runs the game and receives tons of errors that Will doesn't receive. Will can run game and play into the second level. Szymon can't make it to the loading screen. Fuck.

Beta (?)

2005-04-20T18:47:00.000-05:00

I guess I was overly optimistic about this one. Man, that was a rough day. Over the weekend we spent so much time just working on this thing all day and night, working and trying to make this work. Staying up for more than 20 hours had its toll on me. At 7am I started doing stupid mistakes in every line of code; I couldn't concentrate. I got dizzy on my walk back home. Damn game programming is exhausting...

Owning up

2005-04-20T04:30:00.000-05:00

Consider this my formal apology for being such a shitty group member. I should be more involved with the development of the game. My main job all semester has been to work on AI and it's still crap, which means I haven't been taking this seriously.
(* End apology *)

Crunch time should've been a month ago, but i guess it's better to start late than never. I know I don't want to be embarassed about something I worked all semester on.

Being in csug for 14 hrs today didn't piss me off as much as that fucker (aka szymon's best friend) in class who kept talking shit about our art while we were trying to present. The beta was crappy, understandable, but that dick just couldn't shut up. The fucking syringe knight? Using an "I statement": I think that kid was a real prick and if I had the chance I'd knock some of his teeth out.

the final countdown

2005-04-18T10:32:00.000-05:00

We should have that song playing for the next 24 hours. I plan to work on the game for most of that time. As longas I can survive anyways.

It's the final 24 hours for us to make this game work and show everyone that we can do it. I'm willing to hit it up and work on this for most of those 24 hours. I hope everyone else is on the same page. This is what I'm going to tell them: "If you are satisfied with how the game is and are willing to stand by it and say that you did all the work you had to do, then go to sleep." ... watch them all leave me alone :-p

more more more

2005-04-17T19:48:00.000-05:00

There has been a lot of progress these days. A lot of work. We have decided to cut out some design decision we had made in the past. I think that a lot of due has to due with the fact that we either do not have the proper amount of time to implement the features, due to our time press. However, we are doing good. On Tuesday we are going to be presenting a strong version of our game, I believe. I'm positive that many people might be impressed, and it's mainly due to the scope of our game.

Me and Ethan talked today and we both agreed that we didn't know this project was going to be so big. But this experience will be good for that. We have learnt how to deal with issues like lack of art or experience with C++. For example, there's a lot of interesting art that we can use online, and Ethan has helped us find a lot of it.

A good gauge of our scope, I think, is the amount of extra data we have. Like for exmaple, art, config files, sounds and music. Truth be told, we have a lot of content that we are not going to have securely stored by the release date. The reason being that we use text configuration files to load maps, character stats and save the game. Such mechanisms could enable a person to hack up the game and make himself invinsible. At the same time, this "feature" gives the user the ability to modify the game at a more down-to-the-core level.

The code base is constantly growing. According to a line-counting program I have, our project contains > 7000 lines of code at its current state. It is true that if we had dedicated more time to a consistent design we might have cut it to less because we have a substantial amount of code that repeats. But let's face it, we didn't have enough experience with such large projects to be able to decide the amount of planning that would be needed, initial design decisions to make the code 100% readable or how long things might take. By Tuesday, I believe we will end up with more than 8500 lines of code, but maybe not.

Either way, it's gonna be a good game!

nifty stuff

2005-04-17T04:58:00.000-05:00

Yea it's late, but I like doing this kind of stuff. I have been working on a lot of visual things for the game. I don't want to talk about everything too much, but basically, I'm taking advantage of GameX's functtions that enable me to create fadeouts and oscillating transparency. Very nice effects.

So all in all, a lot of things got done today. Much more stuff is getting done tomorrow. And monday... wow. I think I'm going to skip most of my classes and spend 20+ hours at csug.

I guess now the question is, to shower or not?

Added more stuff.. yadda yadda

2005-04-14T23:53:00.000-05:00

More things have been added by yours truly this fine day. I guess my best work went into a skill that the pirate is going to have. At some point, the pirate will be able to scream into the sky and have a huge flock of 50+ parrots descend onto an enemy and massacre that enemy. The actual animations look decently. A flock of parrots descends and circles the enemy in a nice wave pattern and then the HP just goes DOWN. I wrote a nice function disband, in which each parrot flies out of the view of the screen and then gets destroyed. The disbanding looks really cool. The actual flying into, etc, looks decently, but needs some work.

I'm also currently playing with a Loading screen and making sure our save/load option will be available. We decided to drop the going back through levels idea, because it would cost too much resources which we do not have. Plus, level code is backed up, so we're kinda holding many level ideas back.

Lots of work being done.

A bit of a reflection piece

2005-04-13T10:44:00.000-05:00

Little time left, lots of work to do. I guess we kinda skipped through some thought process before we decided to venture on this project. I really thought it was doable, but, as the development progressed, I have realized that the project is a LOT of work. The smart thing would be to have done some kind of complex puzzle game whose core could be implemented in a simple way. For example, both the Sydonis group and the Pandemonium group have done this kind of project, and they're doing very well.

I also feel a bit disadvantaged in that neither of us has had much exposure to C++, whereas the Pandemonium group, for instance, has six people that seem out of which I know three have done coops (one for IBM and two for MS). And the rest are great programmers. But I'm not picking on them at all; I admire their work. They've done an amazing work with the MVC design, their game has progressed very well through the prototypes and into the alpha version and they have room for tons of tweaks and improvements. They were smarter than us in the choice of game idea. So I guess what I'm saying is that the teams' balances are not truly existent, and that most, if not all, people in our group have not had experience with large projects and lack a feeling of how long things take to get done.

This project has been a learning thing, more than anything else. As group leader I feel that the work we do and whatever we achieve will eventually come back to me and that I'm somehow responsible for the team's effectiveness and the resulting product. This, for the purpose of this class, should not be the case. Everyone's got classes, everyone's got prelims, I'm taking 22 credits and all of us are overworked. It's exhausting.

Nonetheless, I'm still confident in our ability to finish this game. This weekend will be real crunch time. I have a prelim tomorrow so I can't dedicate as much time ot this project as I would like. But it's gonna be done.

Recently implemented

2005-03-31T00:19:00.000-05:00

New stuff has been added:

More collision detection

Working health

Basic skills work

Basic items should work

Last hit enemy's health bar appears after you hit them

Simple inventory works and draws selected items on top of screen

And I hear levels are doing well.

More ideas

2005-03-18T12:53:00.000-05:00

Here's a few specific things I have been thinking about and some things we need to do.

Skills are pretty much working. Devise a system so that the player assigns them (depending on the level) and if the skill spot is loaded, has the ability to use it. Implement the recovery time for skills, etc.

Make items work. Be able to place items anywhere around the map and implement character-item collisions. Have ability to fill up the inventory and browse through it. (to test, make a shitty "staR" item with the star.bmp drawing. Then, put 20 of those around and pickup / use / drop, etc.

Make leveling work. If I hit an enemy, make hit HP go down and display it. Make a "last hit enemy HP bar". Have a check that if the enemy dies, the bar goes away. And switched depending on who we are hitting. When I kill them, I want to get experience and I want to see/feel/get levels.

Each enemy should have an inventory as well and when we kill him, he should drop all the items he was carrying. Or should he? We might wanna give it some probability for normal monsters and an 'always drop' option for bosses.

Design more enemies. Especially bosses. Don't worry about their hit points and stats for now. Think special moves, which we can implement as skills and whatnot.

I don't think we should save the game's state (IE, all levels). I think we should save the character. And the player can choose any out of 3-5 difficulties.

Feel free to comment on everything.

p2

2005-03-14T09:15:00.000-05:00

Prototype 2, no audio.

prototype 2 huh?

2005-03-14T00:51:00.000-05:00

Prototype 2 is on the way. I'm not tired at all so I'm staying up working on this for some time. I wanna implement things that we have code for, but we haven't really merged into the project. Plus, a couple of extra things. I finally figured out a couple of things that are really stupid in c/c++ due to the way the files are read. I'll post the prototype later on.

Learning the painful way

2005-03-07T14:10:00.000-05:00

The game development has been coming along really well. But now we've hit a couple of walls which are very annoying. First, I feel like the MSVC++ compiler is playing tricks on me. We have a file called "player.h". In this file we have three things declared and defined. Struct Attributes, Struct Staus and Class Player. Ok? ok. So now, I have a file "Item.h" in which I define class Item. All is fine, as long as I don't want to use anything in player.h. I do include the damn file, and all I get back is "invalid syntax".
Will is also having some problems. Apparently, everywhere he makes a project with the source, he gets the weirdest linker errors I've ever seen. I'm serious. On his computer, in CL^3, in CSUG. It follows him.

the HUD

2005-03-06T14:46:00.000-05:00

Excerpt from an e-mail I sent to Eugene.
Here's something to consider. The health bar is going to be part of something bigger. It's gonna be part of the Heads-Up Display. So you have the game running and drawing in the background, but the heads up display is everything else on the screen that is always there. So, among these things we would like to have the health bar and the possibility to display the characters attributes, experience, level information, etc.
So the functionality of the game will be more generally,

Update()

Draw()

Draw() heads-up display

The heads up display is going to be based entirely on the players characteristics, so imagine a class HUD(Player *p). And what it does is that it draws the heads up display always in the same screen location.

That should give us a good start on the things that are displayed on the screen.

Number two

2005-03-03T13:00:00.000-05:00

So we're getting ready for prototype two, which is due in two weeks? (or something like that). Here's the list fo things we wanna implement.

Health bar.

Inventory implementation plus the ability to browse through items and use them.

Working level with platforms and gaps to show some mechanics.

Some kind of enemies with good AI.

Experience and level mechanism set up.

Projectiles.

Basic powerups (aka, health).

Some kind of ninja walking around.

I think this is a decent list of stuff to have for the next build.

Build we showed in class

2005-03-01T19:09:00.000-05:00

http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/ekk26/PvsN.zip

This is the link for the first build we showed to the class. I think the presentation went pretty well.

Repository is up

2005-02-28T17:14:00.000-05:00

The repository is up. It is a bit of a pain to work with it though. Here's why. We work on the game in Windows. We need to ssh into the cvs server. We log in under our CSUG account. That's fine. So then, we want to access the repository and download it. So we enter the command:
cvs -d :ext:@:/cvsroot checkout . And what happens? The stuff gets downloaded onto our account on the CSUG computers. THEN, we have to get it into our windows machine somehow. To commit, we have to get the source into the damn CSUG account and then commit. Bah. It's a log of bs. But it's good. Much better than e-mailing source back and forth.

Today's graphics lecture was very interesting. We should have a 3d pirates game with all those pimpin graphics...

v.001 (?)

2005-02-28T00:13:00.000-05:00

Mmhmm. Good stuff. Very good stuff. And more to come. Here's v.001. Version .001.

Sunday: Prototype day

2005-02-27T03:17:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is marathon programming day. Getting up at 10am and going to the lab with our laptops to work on the prototype. Things are coming along nicely. Progress so far: We have code that compiles and seems to work well. The main game loop is set up, along with the main menu. No music and no sounds so far. (not important for now...) The base game object classes needed for the prototype are setup. Everything looks good, except for the draw function. A lot of art is done. The code for the level is being worked on.
The basic agenda for tomorrow is as follows:

Will: Finish level code for prototype

Eugene: Provide us with simple AI.

Ethan: Bring art and work on setting up the film strips for animation. We'll need some kind of simple projectile image.

Hugh: If coming, find out how the animation works and how we're gonna set it up for the object base classes.

Me: Link all the code. I have the loop and base objects basically memorized by heart. I have looked at the Level code so far, so I will be unifying all the code. Also, work on Game Concept and Milestone document in free time.

I'll be there, ideally, from noon to midnight. So, it's gonna be a fun day. Hopefully, by the end we'll be done with the prototype, Concept Doc and a good draft of the Milestone Document. Word.

Menus!

2005-02-24T15:15:00.000-05:00

Tonight (i hope), I'll do a last revision on the main game loop before starting to add ObjectBase and a simple version of Level. What's the status of the menu right now? The menu class is created as generally as possible as to accomodate a textual menu or image-based menu. The title screen and the menu that can be accessed in the middle of the game will take advantage of this class.

Additionally, v.00001 has been upgraded to v.00002 because the thing is more functional now. So what's next? We need sounds and images for the menu and title screen. Other than that, I hope that the revision of the main game loop will make the loop easier to understand... damn I wish we had a repository.

for Feb 28

2005-02-24T03:19:00.000-05:00

February 28 is our first deadline. What are we trying to achieve here? The point is to create a playable prototype that demonstrates the game mechanics. Although our game is pretty simple, there is no way we could represent it on pen and paper. So we are left with the only options of coding this stuff together.

It's not too bad. Everyone's doing their thing, and doing it right. We're still in a bit of a relaxed mood, but that will change on Sunday. I would say the goal right now is to get the game running without animation. Just one image that jumps, runs, slashes, etc. Once we're done with that, implementing animation should not be a problem.

We're going to have a array of documents due in week or so, mainly the Milestone document and the Functional Spec. The Milestone document should not be too difficult to conceive. It is pretty clear that we are going to be progressively gaining more levels, implementing the RPG elements, items, etc. All of this will come together, and I think that one we have an actual prototype, we will have more confidence in what/how/why stuff works.

As for the Functional Spec, I have had a tech spec running around for a while now, which is on what we're currently basing the prototype code. What we would need to do is outline the different classes we have, describe them, and create a nice UML document for each. I'm not familiar with any UML tools, so I downloaded one of the first free ones I ran into. Proxy Designer was my choice. It's pretty cool, and great for creating UML.

There is progress going on in all aspect of the game. The Menu/Title Screen and the main game loop are coming along very well, and all I'm doing is minor changes and helper functions. For example, say we have a menu. The best thing to do would be to make each menu item a oool looking image. So I wanted a function that automatically adds all the menu items, given just an array of images in a certain order. ObjectBase (the superclass of almost everything on the screen) is also coming along well. Level design is progressing and so is artwork. We are in good shape.

Pirates vs Ninjas: v .00001

2005-02-15T23:23:00.000-05:00

This is the very first build of our game. It's very cool. We're off to a great start! Download HERE

The foundations

2005-02-15T02:38:00.000-05:00

I have started laying out the code foundation and the main loop, specifying when will the game be paused, on the menu, running, acting weird, accepting cheats (just for me and the group though ;) ), etc. I'm also working on the actual menu and stuff. It is going along decently. It's not going too fast because I have tons of other work to do, especially since this weekend I did not get to do anything. Nonetheless, it is coming along.

Friday is the due date for our concept document. I will write up a very rough version tomorrow and then we'll pass it around and make corrections and make my words prettier and nicer-sounding.

So what's the deal with this militant anti "Micro$oft" stance of two members in our group? ... Speaking about Microsoft, I got an interview for a Co-op position with them this Friday.

The physics engine

2005-02-09T20:30:00.000-05:00

I had been thinking about this, and I think the best way to approach it would be to create the most generic physics engine we could come up with (no matter how small), and have it be a class. It would be either one instance for the whole game, or one instance per character. I think it would be better if it were one per game, to save space. Now the question is how would it work? Well let's ask ourselves, what do we need to implement?

Jumping. Given the speed and strength of a character, I want a function that will be able to calculate determine the velocity given certain variables.

Falling. Each cycle of execution the downward speed of the character would increase, depending on the gravity in the physics class instance.

Knockback. Given the attacker's strengh and the defender's defense and bool isBlocking variable, I want to give the defender a nice knockback.

These are the most important things we want to do. How exactly would the class work? I would like it to work on pointers and not depend on other classes we have created. For example, say that:
PhysicsEngine* phys =
new PhysicsEngine(float gravityConstant, float wind, float dragCoefficient);

So then in the character's update function,

if(char presses jump button) {
phys->jump(speed,strength,&dy);
}

What we would then like to happen is that the character's dy gets a new float value, depending on the physics engine, the speed and strength. I think this seems like a good design for it. I will add all of this in more detail to the technical spec very soon.

Stuff to do

2005-02-08T16:05:00.000-05:00

It has begun. I have created the first version of the technical spec, which can be found here. The following is what each person is going to do, for now.

Todo:

Me: I'm going to layout the overall code structure, and the code loop,
all the sound/image structures, load them up, enum structures, etc.
I'm going to create the Menu and Title Screen as well.

Will: We need some kind of narrative. Can you create a story based on
the level layout we kind agreed on? (ship->beach->jungle->ninja town)
and the other way around for ninjas? You can insert random story bits
between levels, such as the pirate getting his hand chopped off by
some bad guys and being told not to bother them anymore. I don't know,
if you need help, ask. And of course, level design, etc.

Hugh: Coding. ObjectBase. For now we need a good setup of the code and
an overall structure for the commands, etc. We have to agreed on the
controls and etc and some other minor design stuff, but overall it's
all good. Do you think you can get this stuff done by 2/21 ? That's 2
weeks from now and would give us time to link everything together.

Eugene: Coding. AI. I think we should include a system similar to the
one in the second lab. I mean, Acquiring a target, having a function
such as bool CanHit and so on. I think a Finite State Machine like the
one in the lab would work very well. However, I don't expect you to
mark every single tile or any dumb shit like that. So for now, think
of a high level description of what we want and how different
difficulty levels would change this. Also, whenever you have time,
start designing the classes and so on. I'm sure lab2 can provide you
with tons of ideas.

Ethan: So we need art. A lot of it. I guess the prototype date would
be the Friday of week 6, which would be March 4th, I think. So, the
stuff we would need for the prototype, we would need it by March 1st,
just to make sure it loads, animation works, etc, and depending on the
results, tweak the code as necesary.

A little more about pirates

2005-02-01T20:59:00.000-05:00

I just posted about my experience playing the new Sid Meier's Pirates! over at my own blog. I did touch on some of the things about the design which I enjoyed, and although our game will be much simpler and considerably different, I thought I would cross-post here.

The Idea

2005-01-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

A sidescrolling action game with some RPG elements (e.g.
leveling, gaining experience, upgrading equipment/weapons/skills)
revolving around the age-old feud between two of nature's most
violently and viciously opposed natural enemies: pirates and ninjas.

The player will take the role of either a pirate or a ninja in this
timeless battle and fight their way through hordes of the enemy to win
final victory for their side. As they progress through the levels, the
player's character will gain experience, find new weapons and armor,
learn skills such as healing and carpentry(for pirate prosthetics?),
and face challenges in the form of a variety of enemy soldiers and
dastardly enemy boss characters.

ARRR!

2005-01-15T20:23:00.000-05:00

What's the two outfits that every kid uses for Halloween? Ninja and pirate. Right? Right. If you don't agree, you were a lame kid. Pirates and ninjas are awesome. Both have a LOT of cool stuff, although I, personally, would call myself a pirate. Land ho!!! Anyways. I was at a friend's house today and he was playing Ninja Gaiden for the NES. And it came to me, like in a vision. I have played tons of ninja games before. But why not pirate??? As far as I can remember, I never played a game as a pirate. You see where I'm going with this?

That's right matey, let's get that bottle of rum, fill up an angry, bearded pirate with that precious liquid, and make him conquer an Island from the hands of the Spanish Empire! ...think about it...

Clocking in.

2005-01-14T13:11:00.000-05:00

Will here. This class is going to be the defining thing about this semester, and we are going to kick it's bloody ass from here to Quake 4. An RPG is also something I would love to do, but the amount of effort required seems a bit too high. And thanks for volunteering me for writing duty. Bitch. Actually, if we do an RPG, I would love to take some writing duties. I thought maybe we could also recruit Sal to help with art and writing, regardless of our project. He's an English major, after all, so it's not like he has anything else to do. I had also been considering some sort of RTS, since it would allow us to craft the sort of complexity and depth of gameplay that an RPG would provide without needing to put the effort into actually writing a 20 hour script.

I have to say, I'm a wee bit against an action game, only because it seems like a bit of a cop-out. Every dork who ever said "hey, I want to make a computer game!" started by making some crappy FPS. So unless we could come up with one hell of a killer concept, I don't think I'd be real happy with a shooter. It's too eay to make a decent shooter without making a truly fantastic one, and the genre is so saturated that I'd rather not make just another decent one.

The other option would be to go the we-are-just-crazy-amateurs-who-want-to-have-fun route. I was thinking of a game based on Penny Arcade. Like you would be Div on a search for the world's best bottle of Jack Daniels, and you would have to battle Claw Shrimp, or something. Or Salad Master, or any of PA's other throwaway game ideas that are meant as satire but could actually make really fun games.

It is all still pretty early on, so we have lots of decisions to make and discuss.

~Will out.

Designing the Game

2005-01-14T04:48:00.000-05:00

Welcome to Designing the Game. This blog's purpose is to document the progress of a certain project in one of my classes. The class is taught in Cornell University, under the Game Design Initiative. CIS300: Introduction to Game Design. I am going to take this course during the Spring of 2005 and I'm pumped about it. Me and a good friend of mine, Will both enrolled in this course, and we're hoping to work in the same group, on the same project.

I have not given much thought to what kind of game I would like to design/develop. I think an RPG would be an awesoe choice. It would, however, involve a lot of writing of the storyline and dialogue. This is fine, Will would have no problem working on such things. I am here mainly to code and gain experience with some form of technical writing. An idea which came to me just a couple of minutes ago, was a nice shoot-em-up, in the stlye where you would be in a helicopter/jet on this screen, constantly moving up, and enemies would pop up all over and your goal would be to destroy them all and then pass each stage's boss. That would be awesome. Come to think of it, there's this game that I always loved for the sega genesis called Thunder Force 3. Woah... It would be so sweet to make a game like that. I have to say, that was a REALLY good game.

Of course, ideas are still flowing around, even more since school has not started yet. But we're gonna have two rather large required books on game design, and all coding is going to be done in C++ using the GameX libraries, which are provided free of charge. Also, if the game's good enough, we might submit it to Hidden Agenda. This site will be updated with the project's progress throughout the course.

Designing the Game

It's Over!

*sigh*

stats

Story: Kids Love It, Parents Burn in Homemade Napalm

i iz happy

Joy

Presenting our game

The progress and more design issues

Levels

Enemies

another weekend? you know it!

*banging my head against the wall*

Beta (?)

Owning up

the final countdown

more more more

nifty stuff

Added more stuff.. yadda yadda

A bit of a reflection piece

Recently implemented

More ideas

p2

prototype 2 huh?

Learning the painful way

the HUD

Number two

Build we showed in class

Repository is up

v.001 (?)

Sunday: Prototype day

Menus!

for Feb 28

Pirates vs Ninjas: v .00001

The foundations

The physics engine

Stuff to do

A little more about pirates

The Idea

ARRR!

Clocking in.

Designing the Game

sigh

banging my head against the wall