Suit ‘Em Up, SFML and stuff

So, we just the courses for the last semester and we just began the new two courses, Game Programming II and Introduction to Game Development.

We have only had one Game Programming II lecture so far, and I missed it because I was sick that day (fever) so I really can’t say much about what we will do during this course yet. A friend of mine showed me what they coded that lecture though, but my group already got SFML working and we decided that if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. Yeah sure, we have to include things a bit more but it is not that much really, and we have figured out how it works so we don’t want to fuck anything up right now. It seems really useful though and I will definitely use it on future projects.

My group and I decided to make the game Suit ‘Em Up. I really like the concept for this game but we think it is a bit too complex for us so we simplified it a lot. I agreed with this because it seemed like the logical thing to do, but I’m now starting to feel that we simplified it waaay too much. I will take this up on the next meeting because I don’t think this qualifies as the game we choose anymore. Yeah, sure we won’t have big open levels, but I think we can at least create an arcade-type game with more focus on the upgrade system. Right now I feel like it is way too simple. As it is right now we only have on resource and that is score and to upgrade something you spend your score to be able to beat it easier, or you play it the hard way and don’t upgrade one trust your skill and go for the highscore. While I like the Idea this isn’t the game that we choose when we choose this game.  I’m going to request a meeting with the programmers in my group and the lead designer tomorrow, and I’ll write more about it in my next blogpost.

We started to code our game as soon as we knew what we were going to do. I started to work on the states, reading things from .txt-files and I got that working pretty quickly. Viktor started working on player movement and how the enemies works in a modified version of one of his old games (just so he could test it quickly without having to do all the rest of the work, because we can still use some of the code, we just have to port it ourselves to fit in the new project that is built using SFML. I was sick this Monday and Tuesday so I didn’t work because I was way too tired and I didn’t feel good at all. But today my friend Tomas (from a different group) and I worked on sprite-managers together. After that Viktor and I spent some time on writing some of the things he wrote in to my project, we will continue with this tomorrow and now when Ladbon is finished with the Input we can probably get something up and running pretty soon.

We also started to use a different library in C++, SFML at when I first heard this I was not very happy, here we had just spent several weeks learning the basics of SDL and now we were going to learn a new one? But I was pleasantly surprised because everything seems so much simpler and better in SFML than in SDL. Now I see why we switched to SFML.

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Uppsala University Campus Gotland Shoot Suit ‘Em Up C++ SDL SFML