Help! Aliens!

Four weeks? I am astounded!

I'd love to know about how it was made - which language, which engine, etc. It's a fantastic little gem you've got there.

Please, finish it. And please, drop the "game in a month" crap - take your time, polish it nicely, add all those feature creeps you mentioned, and make it special.

I particularly liked the gravity "wormhole" on Level 2.

Thanks for the encouragement deadstar! I'm releaved it worked on your computer. (I've only really tested it on mine). I think you're right and I will spend more time over it.

Anyway, without giving away all my secrets this is what I used:

IDE: Visual C++ Express
Windows Classes: OWLNext
Graphics: OpenGL
Sounds: XACT3 (same as is used on XBox) comes in latest Windows SDK 2008
game engine: none

I didn't use a game engine or graphics engine (except OpenGL) because they are either too general for my needs or they cost thousands of pounds. So I just wrote the code I needed and thats it. For the 3D models I found some 3DS file parser code on the internet which I modified.

Was all that written in the time given, or did you have some base code from previous projects already to hand?

Also, if it's not too big a secret, what level file format was used and what did you use to design them, and how do you handle collision detection?

I'm intruiged, because you have a lot of complicated stuff there - nice looking levels, 3D collision, raycasting (I'm presuming, for shooting), enemy paths, text rendering... it's all impressive stuff for a game on a time budget.

OK, well I suppose I already had the 3DS header file, although I had to adapt it for this project. And I had a nice array class which was useful.

The level format is just my own format in a text file so its nice and easy to read. Could change this to a binary format if I include an in-game level editor.

And for the collision detection you just use simplified shapes and use the standard techniques. So basically its just your plain old trigonometry and vector algebra unfortunately! (Plus a lot of trial-and-error!)

Quote:

Original post by animator So basically its just your plain old trigonometry and vector algebra unfortunately!

No, not unfortunately, that's what I was hoping to hear. I admire your efforts, and I know how much work creating a game like this is with miminal use of external libraries. It's good to see other people doing ALL of it themselves, you'll make a valuable employee very quickly. Brighton, eh? I nearly went to do a course there.