UFEC
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I "finished" my game for UFEC. I've spent the last couple of weeks frantically crunching trying to get it someway reasonable, so even though I posted it a few days ago I'm only now getting around to writing about it.
I've mixed feelings about the situation.
Primarily, at the time I was quite annoyed at how poor the game turned out, it need a lot more balance and polish. There are some odd little bugs in there that I simply didn't have time to track down or weren't too important.
With the benefit of a little break though, I'm quite happy with it. It isn't finished, and I will surely come back to it in the near future to take it the whole way, but it contains the essential ingredients that I was hoping to include.
Its reasonably fun to play and looks nice in motion, even if the graphics could do with quite a bit of tweaking.
I've learned a lot too, I had never really designed a game before, and it definitely shows. I left all the gameplay decisions until too late, being more of a programmer I concentrated on getting most of it built rather than prototyping the core aspects of the game. Though I am pleased with the code, not too overdesigned yet still in good shape despite the epic hack-a-thon trying to get it done.
The "levels" were all thrown together at the last minute. While I sketched them out before making them, they were in no way designed and were more of a show case of most of the stuff I had done, in no particular order. The rather weak "level editor" is possibly another cause of this, all it allows is the placement and deletion of obstacles, its quite hard to "tweak" levels because you cannot move the pieces of terrain around.
There were some nice surprises. My totally unoptimised Java code, running immediate mode OpenGL and using a native Java physics library that I believe defensively copies Vec2 instances when you read them performed admirably, at least on the two machines I tested it on. One was a laptop with a graphics card that didn't support power of two textures, so I assumed the hardware wasn't great.
Its fine to talk about Java coming close to native languages in theory, but its quite another thing to see it actually happening. I'd really like to try it out on a wider range of hardware to see how it performs. Maybe I would be disappointed though [smile]
Download link
Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments, or you could use the UFEC thread for the game.
I've mixed feelings about the situation.
Primarily, at the time I was quite annoyed at how poor the game turned out, it need a lot more balance and polish. There are some odd little bugs in there that I simply didn't have time to track down or weren't too important.
With the benefit of a little break though, I'm quite happy with it. It isn't finished, and I will surely come back to it in the near future to take it the whole way, but it contains the essential ingredients that I was hoping to include.
Its reasonably fun to play and looks nice in motion, even if the graphics could do with quite a bit of tweaking.
I've learned a lot too, I had never really designed a game before, and it definitely shows. I left all the gameplay decisions until too late, being more of a programmer I concentrated on getting most of it built rather than prototyping the core aspects of the game. Though I am pleased with the code, not too overdesigned yet still in good shape despite the epic hack-a-thon trying to get it done.
The "levels" were all thrown together at the last minute. While I sketched them out before making them, they were in no way designed and were more of a show case of most of the stuff I had done, in no particular order. The rather weak "level editor" is possibly another cause of this, all it allows is the placement and deletion of obstacles, its quite hard to "tweak" levels because you cannot move the pieces of terrain around.
There were some nice surprises. My totally unoptimised Java code, running immediate mode OpenGL and using a native Java physics library that I believe defensively copies Vec2 instances when you read them performed admirably, at least on the two machines I tested it on. One was a laptop with a graphics card that didn't support power of two textures, so I assumed the hardware wasn't great.
Its fine to talk about Java coming close to native languages in theory, but its quite another thing to see it actually happening. I'd really like to try it out on a wider range of hardware to see how it performs. Maybe I would be disappointed though [smile]
Download link
Feel free to leave any feedback in the comments, or you could use the UFEC thread for the game.
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