The Goal

Create a graphical game. Possibly release it publicly.

Why?

For over ten years, I spent varying amounts of my free time creating new content for a text-based multiplayer game called Ancient Anguish. I feel like I have little to show for that time investment, mostly because it’s all text and hard to show people who aren’t familiar with the game.

I also still like creating games, despite not contributing to Ancient Anguish for the past couple of years.

Progress so far…

My previous experience is mostly with the LPC programming language for Ancient Anguish. I also learned a fair amount of C++ years ago during previous game-programming attempts, which I put to use while doing the AI list items. My previous attempts involved Microsoft’s DirectX APIs, which requires the programmer to add in a lot of the background code (e.g. to display models). I also briefly used the Unity game engine, which does a lot more of the background work.

I have actually done a lot of the work for this list item, but haven’t got around to posting about it until now. I abandoned a fair amount of work on my first game, because I was unable to easily load, display and animate 3D models while using DirectX. I will come back to this game, but will try to create it in Unity when I have more spare time to learn how to use Unity.

The current game I am working on is a very simple, first-person game. The player is presented with a series of questions and must run into the answers to score as many points as possible before the time runs out. The answers are the numbers 0 to 9 (for simple math questions) and the letters A to D (for multiple choice questions).

I have already finished all the background code, except for loading the questions from a file. Much of the information in the game is loaded from text files, to enable users to experiment with modifications. Given that the game can be so easily modified, there is no point saving high scores, so I’ve scrapped that part of my original design. When the time runs out, the game simply shows a ‘game over’ screen with the final score.

After the question loading has been added, I need to work on improving the visual appearance. I had a simple appearance in mind, partly based on an old game from around 1996, but I need to make one or two changes for it to look right.

The draft list item included releasing the game, but I’m not sure whether that’s important to me. I loved it when people enjoyed using my creations on Ancient Anguish, and I followed an interesting GameDev.net developer journal where the readers became buyers/users at the end. However, I’m not sure whether publicly releasing my game will be possible, and I’d like to be able to tick off this list item eventually! Based on some brief skim-reading, I might have more luck releasing a game made with Unity, so I’ll investigate that after I polish off my current game.

So, the plan from here: add question-loading code, tinker with visual appearance, then try to load the game on other computers. After that game’s done, I might look into Unity.