Today was a very productive day. When I left off I had the basic game up and running, but the backend was a mess. I had gamestate information all mixed up in the renderer, just to get the proof of concept down. This morning I took care of all of that, implementing the gamestate proper and stitching it to the renderer through the base application engine. This provides much more organization and makes debugging much easier due to classes being separated without deep reliance upon other classes unnecessarily. This will also come in handy when I finally implement the animation update separate from the draw call so the game will run smoothly and consistently across different versions of the iPhone (that is, better on everything else from my lame 3G).
Once I had the backend to a point I was satisfied with I continued working on getting the core game engine to a playable point. I decided to go with a fixed camera that follows the player's ship as they move around the playing field. I had considered a 'frame' setup where the camera would only move when the player left a certain boundary, but the simplicity of the fixed camera out weighed any gain provided by the other method. Proper controls are also implemented now to change color, so they game can actually be 'played'. I've started playing around with level borders as well, so that got a basic implementation in place.
Two things that go together that I need to work on now are the menus, and the level loader. I haven't decided the format of my levels yet and how I'm going to store them, but I've asked on the forums and weighing a few options. Once that's squared away I can build the (basic) menu system around it and be very close to the framework of an actual game. It shouldn't be too long to where I'm focusing on content creation rather than engine work, but that's to be seen.
Something my stepdad and I were talking about, and I've always thought is a really neat feature of a game engine is a debug menu. I don't have the game engine tuned to where everything interacts correctly just yet, and a debug menu would make things way easier. Plus having a back door to poke and prod at my engine in realtime makes me feel all fuzzy inside. Something to consider for the not too distant future.
Also, here's some evidence of the work being done:
No comments:
Post a Comment