Saturday, August 23, 2008

Artillery Battlespace

In my fall semester of '07 I took a Graphics Processing class, which I absolutely hated no thanks to the professor, and our final project was to create a game using XNA. The game 2 other classmates and I created, Artillery Battlespace, was based off of Scorched3D and the Worms game series. The game, unfortunately, was not completed, and although we got good marks for it, it left a lot to be desired. I have taken it upon myself to continue with the project and see if I can finish it and add more interesting content. I have enlisted my old high school buddy Shikyi to help with some art stuff. This will primarily be a side project since I do currently have a full time job as a coder for a local software company in ABQ.

Currently my plan for the game is the following:
  • Rename game

  • Refactor

    • reorder and rename variables

    • set proper access (make most private) and use Properties as the main form of access (C#'s version of getters/setters).

    • clean up functions

    • clean up game states

    • Fix and/or reorder Player/Tank relation

  • New art - with help from Shikyi

  • New Models - with help from Shikyi

  • Add Shaders (is going to require some research on my part)

  • Fix lighting

  • Fix bounding box


Currently those are the items I've been thinking about. I've been doing the refactoring part mostly and occasionally fixing a function here and there. When we created the game we had 3 or 4 weeks to do it, so we were in quite a rush to get it done; code cleanliness took a backseat to code production. I hope to move on to fixing class structures afterward. I do believe they could definitely use it. After that, I'll probably work on a proper game layout, and hopefully, if I'm not tired of this, work on the gameplay. I'm trying to save the graphics for last since I had a lot of trouble with it before. There are a lot more tutorials out there now, so I plan to utilize them.

I'm definitely hoping to get a decent game set up. This has always been a big dream of mine and if I can create at least 1 game, then I can die a happy man ;)

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