Summary Of The Big Game Course

Okey this will be my last post on this blog. GGC and the big game course has now come to an end, and what do I think about the hole project?

Well at GGC our game didn't meet up with the expectations and we tried to fix something that could be played. At the end of day 2 at GGC we kind of had something with network, but it was very buggy. Though the game was buggy, we got lots of feedback that the concept was good and if we could fix all the bugs this could be a really fun game. So i hope that they didn't lie to us about the concept, because if the concept has potential to be great then investing more time on the project is a certain fact for me.

My opinion why it didnt go as planned with the programming was that we had to little experience with XNA/C# and that we thought that we could do anything. So network in the game, HLSL programming, Physicengine that was very complexed, the level editor etc.. all this I now think was way out of our hands. We tried to do to much insteed of keep it simple. Looking back did we really need network? could it insteed been an single player experince, should we have taken an all ready existing engine insteed of making our own. Well the questions are many but little anwsers do I have.

Yeah its risky to do your own engine but experience(as I have/will mention a couple of time) is very valuable if you look further ahead. I know that this only benefits the programmers but at GGC we had our little solution for that, the graphics content was put in an graphics-folder that people could open and look around in. Its more difficult for the designers to show their work, so doing an own engine also have its down sites. So I'm not saying that you must do your own engine or you shouldn't do your own engine I'm just saying that it is an option.    

Try to see the positive side of this for my own is that I learned much about XNA and C#, also learned HLSL programming that I will be doing much more of in the future. Also see how simple Serialize and Deserialize are in XNA  is heaven if you compare it with..yeah lets go for C++. I also learned new idéas of how to structer your own engine and use XNA/C# to implement so called ”components”  wich can come in handy in future projects. Another thing is that I got more experienced working in a group and see how important communication is between the different people in the group. I also think that insteed of doing a well written report doing a buggy game is alot more well spending time, because of the experince you get from it, okey we faild now we know what we shouldnt do. As simple as that. 

In the end working on Slingshot with the group has been fun and educational, over the summer I will have do diced what the next step will be, stay with slingshot and try to fix the game, our mabey start with something new. It will have to be diceded later. For now all I now is that though it didnt go as planned I have had so much fun with the team and I hope all the best to everyone.

Thanks for reading.

Christoffer Forslund.  

Week 20

Okey so this week I have been doing some stuff here and some stuff there, in the start of the week I continued with the laser weapon. After 1,5 days trying to get it working properly I decided to hand the task over to our lead programmer because I couldn't get it to work.

After the dicepontment not getting the laser to work I helped out with the network, fixing the client class and testing it so we could get in to the beta state. Our goal was "When  we  have network we go into beta".

End of the week I started helping out with the HLSL programming, more specific the lightning in our game. So I started reading about the subject and trying to understand how HLSL programming works.

Thanks for reading.

Week 19

Okey so this week have been all about adding a new weapon to the player, and its a laser.

Why it took so long time to add this weapon was as usual that i didn't knew how the code was built, so I tried to follow the same structure that the grappling hook has and I think the laser weapon is complete now. Its not perfect so I will probably tune it a little in the next week.

Tanks for reading.

Week 18

The start of this week I finished updating the spritecomponent, so now it should work properly. The problem was that I forgot about sending the graphicsdevice to the spritecomponent, but when I fixed that the component worked the way I wanted.

After that my new task was to create a input system and as usual I did some research on how to create this new system. Through reading I got a pretty good idea on how to create a input system. I ended up with creating a system that at the moment support game pad and keyboard. End of the week I did much testing of the system and I think i m done with this task now and will start with something new.

Thanks for reading. 

Week 17

Okay so this week I have finished my work on the particle system. At first it was a bit confusing trying to implement the system in the engine. My particlecomponent goes in to my particle system, my particle system goes into my particle manager. This code was no problem to implement, but when I realized all the other classes that need information about my three classes all got a hole lot worse. So to fix this problem I added different helper classes and xml files to help hold all the data for different particle effects. So now we can create different particle effects through xml files and get some really interesting results.

At the end of the week, I started adding code for our first playable on Thursday next week. The task at hand is get the background to show... I realized that the Pointspritecomponenet didn't support this, so I have dug in into that class and hopefully I can fix that soon. 

Thanks for reading.

Week 16

This week I finished  testing so the sprites got a z-axes and got it all working. After that I started implementing  the code in all the classes that needed it. Got a new task to create a particle manager that we will have for.. yes particle effects. So yet again I did much reading on the subject, because I had no idea how to write a particle manager. After looking at some tutorials I think I have a good idea how to build this manager.

 On Wednesday a got sick so the rest of the week I stayed at home, but tried to work anyway.

Thanks for reading.

Week 15

Week 15

So this week my primary task was to create a SpriteManager class and a SpriteComponent class. I started with the SpriteComponent and worked  my way from there. When the SpriteComponent was finished I started with the SpriteManager, added functions and testing them on the way. When the two classes where finished I started on implementing them in the engine.

Now that was the tricky part and the part that took the longest time to do, because I had to add code in many different classes. So trying to navigate through and look for errors  in the code got very confusing at some times, but after many different failing attempts I finally figured it out and I had my one second of happy moment. And then we started to discuss particle effects...    

Anyway right now we can use our SpriteManager and SpriteComponent to create our GUI if want, but  i m not done yet with our sprite system I have now started looking how to add some depth to our sprites as well, because right now as I mentioned earlier we can only us my system for GUI and we also want the z-axes, so thats my new task to look into.   

Thanks for reading.

My work between week 13 - 14

Week 13

This week has been all about creating and tuning a XMLManager to our engine. For those how don't know we are creating our own game engine with XNA.

The work has been manly focused on XML, much reading trying to understand the theory behind serialize and deserialeze. The greatest challenge in building a structured system for XML  in my opinion is trying to see the bigger picture. What I mean by that is all the questions you will have to answer beforehand.

Will all the entities be in one .xml file? how will my serialize/deserialize work with the editor? why is it so hard trying to spell serialize?.

The end of the week I changed a few things in the XMLManager but nothing major, just some minor tweaks. Anyway I completed my task and started working on a StateManager and a State class.

Week 14 
   
Okay so this week my focus has been on a StateManager and a State class. Like with the XMLManager I had to do alot of reading in the beginning.  I had a roughly good idea of how I wanted the StateManager to work, but this was only in theory.

So starting building up the statemanger and at the same time alot of testing of the class. Added three different states menu, game and end state. Later on I hope these states will help create a more dynamic flow in the engine.

The end of this week was very much alike the previous week, some tweaking and implementing all necessary things in the engine that had to do with the Statesystem, but now this task is also done and I'm waiting on the next task to do.

Welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog.


This blog will let the readers follow my progress as a programmer in the upcoming spaceshooter game called "Slingshot". So check back often to see the latest updates I have done.

Thanks for reading.