Started Writing a Game

I started writing a game! Here’s the origin:

commit 54dbc81f294b612f7133c8a3a0b68d164fd0322c
Author: Wraithan (Chris McDonald) <xwraithanx@gmail.com>
Date: Mon Sep 5 17:11:14 2016

 initial commit

Ok, now that we’re past that, lets talk about how I got there. I’ve been a gamer all my life, a big portion of the reason I went into software development was to work on video games. I’ve started my own games a couple times around when I as 18. Then every couple years I dabble in rendering Final Fantasy Tactics style battle map.

I’ve also played in a bunch of AI competitions over the years. I love writing programs to play games. Also, I recently started working at Sparkypants, a game studio, on Dropzone a modern take on RTS. I develop a bunch of the supporting services in the game our matchmaking and such.

Another desire that has lead me here is the desire to complete something. I have many started projects but rarely get them to a release quality. I think it is time I make my own game, and the games I’ve enjoyed the most have been management and simulation games. I’ll be drawing from a lot of games in that genre. Prison Architect, Rimworld, FortressCraft Evolved, Factorio, and many more. I want to try implementing lots of the features as experiments to decide what I want to dig further into.

The game isn’t open source currently, maybe eventually. I’m building the game mostly from scratch using rust and the glium abstraction over OpenGl/glutin. I’m going to try to talk about portions of the development on my blog. This may be simple things like new stuff I learn about Rust. Celebrating achievements as I feel proud of myself. And whatever else comes up as I go. If you want to discuss stuff I prefer twitter over comments, but comments are there if you would rather.

So far I’ve built a very simple deterministic map generator. I had to make sure the map got it’s own seed so it could decide when to pull numbers out and ensure consistency. It currently requires the map to be generated in a single pass. I plan to change to more of a procedural generator so I can expand the map as needed during game play.

I started to build a way to visualize the map beyond an ascii representation. I knew I wanted to be on OpenGL so I support all the operating systems I work/play in. In Rust the best OpenGL abstraction I could find was glium which is pretty awesome. It includes glutin so I get window creation and interaction as part of it, without having to stitch it together myself.

This post is getting a bit long. I think I’ll wrap it up here. In the near future (maybe later tonight?) I’ll have another post with my thoughts on rendering tiles, coordinate systems, panning and zooming, etc. I’m just a beginner at all of this so I’m very open to ideas and criticisms, but please also be respectful.