Good News Everyone!

Today I received my initial mark and feedback for the first Advanced Games Studies assignment, I got 79% which is a reasonably safe 1st. It also means I don’t have to work on sprint 2 to improve my grade, which gives me extra time on my dissertation, and I like extra time for everything!

I’ve also implemented some more stuff in my PhysX Games Engine assignment, there are now blocks that the ball destroys when it hits them, I’m pretty happy with it (The video below doesn’t show the ball reacting to the blocks, but it does now… trust me.) This coming week I hope to finish implementing some extra PhysX features like joints and convex objects in order to get a higher grade!

I’ve also hit 20,000 words in my novel, I should hopefully have a complete first draft by the end of December. I’ve had a look into getting it printed, 100 copies should cost around £300… which is steep but I can reclaim the costs if I sell the books for £5.00 each. Where I’m going to get the initial funds from I do not know, but hopefully I’ll have a job come summer to pay for it! I’ve also looked into releasing it for the Kindle, which could be a cool idea.

To quote my old history teacher Dr. Perry: “Happy days chums!”

Now for a well deserved drink in the nearby student pub!

Game Engines Assignment – My Idea!

So I really wanted to use cloth in my Game Engines assignment. Our task is to re-create the basic idea of breakout but with interesting PhysX mechanics added into it. I’ve come up with the following idea to implement cloth into the game:

A piece of cloth is attached to two boxes by its edges like a suspended parachute. The games ball then lands in the centre and then rolls into the centre. When the player holds down the space bar, the two boxes move away from each other, making the cloth pull upwards quickly – the resultant force should propel the sphere up into the air!

The player then has to control the two boxes in order to re-capture the ball and then fire it off in different directions (depending on where it is on the piece of cloth…) in order to destroy the blocks above. Of course the cloth will be un-tearable so that the ball won’t crash through and ruin the game.

I’m going to try and implement this over the next few days depending on how much work I can get done on my dissertation project. I am not sure if the sphere will actually collide correctly with the cloth, so this will be an experiment to see if the idea is actually viable as a method of gameplay.

Advanced Games Studies Work (Slimy Goodness)

I think from now on I’m going to add slimes to every game I make. They’re just so damn adorable! I’ve also added some sound effects for the background and the slime’s jumping action. The sound effect for the slime is one made by a good friend Louis Bartlett, who is looking to get into sound design – some top notch work!

Next thing to do: Get the player shooting projectiles at the enemies… simple enough!

Advanced Games Studies Work (22/11/2017)

I’ve been added to a new group for advanced games studies class at university… unfortunately they haven’t really had very much luck in the way of programmers since the start of this semester: so there was a distinct lack of code or game-play implemented.

This week I’ve spent my time re-coding the current game engine that the team had in place, the whole game was controlled by one script – so the object-oriented programmer in me was screaming like a mad-man. It didn’t take to long to re-code what there was there, and now it all works properly. Keys have also been added to the game so the player cannot continue until they unlock doors. (I also stuck a few place-holder textures in and added a black fog and some ambient lighting to make the game look far less pre-alpha than it did last week.)

It’s looking a great deal more promising as a project now, the team has one more week on this before the presentation on the third of December. Next week I plan to implement some form of enemy and a fighting mechanic (probably a projectile based one).