Starting a new programming course!

So I have started this new course called Gameprogramming III. It feels good to start coding after a few months of game design.
We started of the week by creating a BMP compressor in C++ just to get into programming again. We had to compress a bitmap image file to the smallest possible size. I got down to ~10 KB. It was really fun to work with that. I got to work on the binary level which is pretty new for […]

Starting a new programming course!

So I have started this new course called Gameprogramming III. It feels good to start coding after a few months of game design.
We started of the week by creating a BMP compressor in C++ just to get into programming again. We had to compress a bitmap image file to the smallest possible size. I got down to ~10 KB. It was really fun to work with that. I got to work on the binary level which is pretty new for […]

Stealth game: Items

In this post, I will put all of my focus on items and how they are used in the game.Since we are creating a top down stealth game we do need some items to make the game play more dynamic. It is no fun just to sneak/sprint trough the map and dodging the guards. With items, you can affect how the guard interacts with you and how they interact overall. One item is also needed to finish the level.
1. WeaponsWhat […]

Artificial inteligence

Today I will speak about AI. More specific about the AI we implemented in our stealth game.
This post will cover every detail of how we planned the AI. Unfortunately we have not implemented all of our ideas in code because it is quite advanced and there is not enough time to create it. But we have the most important ideas.
Our guards will use the AI to chase and kill the player. This is pretty important in this kinds of games […]

Game configurations

Today I am going to talk about game configurations and how they were implemented in the project. A configuration file is just a ordinary text file with game information that is loaded into the game. But I am not doing this the ordinary way, I am using something much better.We start of this post by asking ourselves a question.
Why do we need configurations?Every game needs some sort of configuration to make it easier to change things on demand and making it […]

A* Pathfinding

Today I am going to talk about path finding, more specifically A* path finding which is just one of many methods of doing path finding.

What is path finding?
Essentially, path finding is a technique for finding a way trough a bunch of obstacles from point A to point B.
In general you apply path finding with AI, but there are other cases that path finding is used as well.

What is A*?
A* is a heuristic graph based algorithm.
A grid of nodes is used to […]

Soundripples

Prepare for a long blog post. Go get some coffee or something becuase here we go (:
Since we make a stealth action game we needed to handle light and sound in a smart way since guards will see or hear you.Since I already made a blogpost about the light I wont bring it up except small parts of it. This post will focus on the hearing detection of the guards.
What did I need?Our main character and the guards will emit […]

Weekly update 2014-02-13

This week has been the most productive week in our projects lifetime.
We have inplemented and finished the vision fields that our guards and cameras will have.
We have also updated our maploader with some extra features which I will talk about here:

Loading objects(rectangles):
Because we don’t check collision with single tiles, we “merge” together the tiles collision boxes in order to make the game optimized. This is also used for creating spawnpoints or a special
We use this for:

Setting player, guard and camera […]

Viewport

Bah! Instead of going to bed I wanted to create a viewport for our game prototype.
So what is a viewport?A viewport is a portion of the whole game screen that can be manipulated to show any area on the whole game screen by setting a position on it. In my example the viewport centers around the main character(the player).In my algorithm I added some lines of code that will prevent the viewport from showing extra stuff outside the game window […]

Raycasting

Today we finished our protype which was to create a raycasting method to make “light” or a field-of-view if you want. The final prototype is a field of view that spawns in a guard object. That will illustrate what the guard can actually see. I mostly followed this tutorial but I got a big bunchof help from a friend, Johannes Häggqvist which also went on this university which back then was named HGO.

http://www.redblobgames.com/articles/visibility/

I tried to divide the prototype into […]

Scroll

I have implemented scrolling in my highscore state. So when the rows of highscore is bigger than the actual window, you can scroll down/up.
And I have also cleaned up my code ALOT.Tomorrow I will fix highscore ordering.

DropManager

Today I reworked the drop system and added a DropManager which will manage the drop spawning.I made a textfile so that each powerup has a number(their chance) like this:
bigger_pad 1000smaller_pad 1000extra_life 200shield 500
and then I added everything up and that is 1000 + 1000 + 200 + 500 = 2700.And then I need to calculate a barrier for each drop.
then its like 500 / 2700 = shield barrierand 1000 / 2700 = bigger_pad and smaller_pad chance.
When I spawn a drop I randomize a […]