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[KinoftheFlames]

Hello everyone I'm new to the TIG forums but I've been on the TIG DB for a few months now after getting into the indie movement. I've been dabbling in game development for a while now and I think I'm ready to commit to making bigger game with some actual merit to it! So without any more stalling...

Download
-- None yet since there's nothing to show --

Description
Athena (project title) is a 2D shmup survival building sandbox game with technology advancement. What does that mean? Well your main goal is to survive, aka not die. Past that, do whatever you want! Explore, find resources, build with those resources. Find food and water to keep your character from crapping out on you (stupid meatbags). Use your resources to create tools and devices to help you terraform the land for irrigation or to hunt animals better. Find new resource types after discovering new technology (via tools or devices) and repeat the process! Oh and there's stuff that tries to kill you. Watch out for that.

Difficulty Expectations
I expect the most problems to come from me not having much experience in game development. I've taught myself all I know either through scouring online resources or via trial and error. It's a long lonely path, but eventually I'll make something that someone might consider a game!

I plan to put it up for download as soon I have anything that resembles a playable game, and from there on I will update the game regularly until it reaches its full potential.

Screenshots
Note: this is based on the previous setting of space. The new game setting will be earth/wilderness based (as soon as I draw some new sprites)


Any feedback is welcome!

[tesselode]

Sounds like an interesting idea; the sandbox element could be helped by a storyline and obvious impacts of your actions on the storyline.

[KinoftheFlames]

I've come across my first major roadblock: texture rendering. Currently rendering the texture of each tile from the grid individually drops FPS by 97.6% (from 500fps down to 12fps in debug) which is clearly unacceptable.

The grid (universe) is divided up into sectors which will be used in the future to load/unload areas of the map dynamically as the player moves across the universe. So I decided a good way of solving the framerate issue would be to instead render the grid by sectors. Then the only time I would need to go through each tile individually would be when a new sector is generated or when the tiles in a sector have changed.

Unfortunately I'm having a hard time grasping how to handle the images by pixels or memory locations. And I would have to do one of those in order to string the textures of all the tiles in a sector into one large texture that I can load each frame.

Code:

void Sector::createSectorTexture(Physics& physics, std::vector<Tile> blockList) //TODO: broken, only displays white image
{
	std::vector<sf::Uint8> pixels(physics.SECTOR_SIZE * physics.TILE_SIZE * physics.SECTOR_SIZE * physics.TILE_SIZE * 4);
	
	for (int i=0; i<tile.size(); i++)
	{
		for (int j=0; j<tile[i].size(); j++)
		{
			pixels.push_back(*blockList[tile[i][j]].texture.GetPixelsPtr());
		}
	}

	texture.LoadFromPixels(physics.SECTOR_SIZE * physics.TILE_SIZE, physics.SECTOR_SIZE * physics.TILE_SIZE, &pixels[0]);

	texture.SetSmooth(false);
	sprite.SetImage(texture);
}

[LazyWaffle]

Sounds like Minecraft mixed with a shmup. Both of which I love unconditionally

Can't wait to see how this turns out. What are you making this with?

[KinoftheFlames]

Can't wait to see how this turns out. What are you making this with?

Thanks for your support! I'm writing it from scratch in C++ using SFML as my graphics library and Visual Studio as my IDE.

On a side note I'm rather proud to say that I found a way to calculate collision detection between the player and tiles with almost no drop in framerate! unlike that stupid texture rendering...

[KinoftheFlames]

So far today I've added player collision detection with tiles and the ability to destroy them, among other patches. And I've got a new screenshot that is a little easier on the eyes.

First here's the original screenshot (since I'll be removing it from the first post and I'd like to chronicle the progress):


And the new one, with some destroyed environment:

[KinoftheFlames]

So I've been wanting to get back to developing for a while a few weeks and now that I have plenty of time I plan to! Well at least for the next month or two until I get bored/fed up and come back again later.

I changed the graphics around a bit, and I don't think I did a half-bad job considering I have no skill or desire for art. I think I'll be sticking with the style it has now since I like the whole simplicity / vibrant single colors look, but graphics will probably get an overhaul sometime way in the future when the simplistic-style doesn't match the verbosity that needs to be shown.



Having said that and shown that image, I'm going to be changing the graphics... again! I originally was imagining this as a space game, but the idea of exploring and living in space seems so bleak and not nearly as vibrant as living on a world with flora and fauna.

The premise of a survival-building-shmup will remain the same, the setting will just change from space to a more earth-like terrain.