What are you doing in game development today?

[Jason_Miao]

I'm wondering how easy it would be to program a simple shmup engine (the answer is probably "it's not, moron, or everyone would be doing it")

shmups are pretty straight-forward and when first attempting game development, most people start with either a shmup or a platformer, due to their relative simplicity over other types of games.

Heh.  Breakout/pong, then a "demo MUD" to demonstrate a proposed architecture for interoperable MUDs.

I'm assuming that you're not trying to make a generic build-your own shmup engine like that R-shmup and rather just a simple engine for your own use. That kind of engine is relatively easy to build and I suggest you start with something simple like a scrolling background and work up from there.

Oh, and yes. Everyone IS doing it.

Damn.  Now I need to too, or I won't be cool.

Edit:  And actually, I was messing around with the Touhou games when I started with the idea of the initial Galactic Destroyer attacking the kingdom in Ben Oliver's story Nuke 'Em Till They Glow.  Naturally, you'd play as the Galactic Destroyer out to blow up the 'Good Guys' because you're genuinely unaware that the lesser races might dislike being destroyed.

Features would be the ability to take multiple hits (HP), replenish bombs by grazing or running into enemies (which kills them), and you could 'capture spells' to give you more types of bombs, blah blah blah.  Different than the arcade shmups, but nothing revolutionary.  Slow moving bullet hell and laser beams, of course.  

Then I realized that it should be possible to plan a language to generate a game engine, based on the writer's description of each in-game powerup, bullets, players, enemies, and player's bombs, and an enemy's bombs (special attacks, if any).   Sprites shouldn't be too difficult.  Rolling backgrounds, in theory, shouldn't be too difficult (moving picture at the furthest layer).

Then I realized how silly I was being since I've never even written a simple shmup and don't even know where the real bottlenecks and unobvious problems will crop up. :)

NOTE: Silly names make it sound more important than it is (much in the same way as quoting someone at the beginning of a story makes an intro seem deeper and more grandiose)

I need remember to quote this at some point.  Hopefully when I have a project with an unpronounceable acronym.

[Dracos]

I'm wondering how easy it would be to program a simple shmup engine (the answer is probably "it's not, moron, or everyone would be doing it")

shmups are pretty straight-forward and when first attempting game development, most people start with either a shmup or a platformer, due to their relative simplicity over other types of games.

Dracos is right, though, that it depends on what kind of features you want to include in your engine, like Bullet Hell patterns or power-ups (Bullet Hell video: http://shmup.blogspot.com/) (Touhou video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bHAFi49j7k).

I'm assuming that you're not trying to make a generic build-your own shmup engine like that R-shmup and rather just a simple engine for your own use. That kind of engine is relatively easy to build and I suggest you start with something simple like a scrolling background and work up from there.

Oh, and yes. Everyone IS doing it.

***

Speaking of game development...

I'm being forced to delay production on my Molgendan game temporarily due to demands from one of my class projects: a Monopoly game. I've decided to put my efforts into designing a good GUI for it, which I will be implementing in XNA (that way, I can prototype some of my Molgendan features ^_^ ; too birds with one stone). Also, it's a good excuse so I can wait for the next release of the XNA Framework in April before trying to do anything overly complex.

Desired Feature (with tentative name):
FATE - Finite Animation-Transition Engine
:: I'm going to try and make a system that transitions well from one animation to another dynamically based on predefined state transitions, or keyframes.

NOTE: Silly names make it sound more important than it is (much in the same way as quoting someone at the beginning of a story makes an intro seem deeper and more grandiose)

This ought to be fun...
-22

Actually, most start with a puzzle game.  Some form of puzzle game clone is infinitely simpler to make than a platformer (which involves several reasonably complex starting concepts) or really any scrolling game.  Having to maintain a single screen realestate is a much simpler thing than even a basic shmup.

Dracos

[twentytwo]

Actually, most start with a puzzle game. Some form of puzzle game clone is infinitely simpler to make than a platformer (which involves several reasonably complex starting concepts) or really any scrolling game. Having to maintain a single screen realestate is a much simpler thing than even a basic shmup.

I can agree with that, but I really don't see the fun in it (I'll assume you're doing this because you WANT to). I mean, if you're going to pick something, you might as well choose one that is "infinitely" scalable. To make a good puzzle game, it has to be somewhat decent the first time through; those games are all about perfecting timing and challenge, which weighs heavy on the ol' thinker. As for platformers or shmups, you just have to manage basic movement, backgrounds, obstacles, and make sure the collision works; anything else can be added on incremently should the need arise (power-ups, bosses, minibosses, selectable characters, more levels, story, etc etc). Also, it's much easier to reuse a shmup or platformer engine than a puzzle engine, unless you want to make 13 different versions of the same game (adding bombs to Tetris does not make it a new game >_<).

shmup was Microsoft's genre of choice when they first did their C# Digipen webcasts, as well as in XNA (Spacewar Starter Kit), and I honestly don't see it as a bad thing - it makes you focus on all the necessary elements a game needs and teaches you just how difficult game development can be without makig it so difficult that you can't get it done.

NOTE: Silly names make it sound more important than it is (much in the same way as quoting someone at the beginning of a story makes an intro seem deeper and more grandiose)

I need remember to quote this at some point. Hopefully when I have a project with an unpronounceable acronym.

Thanks for the complement.

I always wanted to have a game start up with an intro that read along those lines (complete with ominous music and slow scrolling letters... written vertically in japanese with subtitles and a deep voice-over...)

"Quoting someone famous makes an intro seem deeper than it really is... ~Me"

Complete with Inflated Ego!
-22

From my story Pokie Hunter-
Poison <grimace>: You have a chip on your shoulder...
Cobra: Oo, potato!
Poison <pulls out gun>: Here, let me get it for you...

[Dracos]

Done with my semester project at this point.  I'd share it but it is still under NDA for another many months.

Moving on the week after next to start work at  Crystal.  Probably won't be able to talk about any of that either, unfortunately, but who knows.  At the very least, I'll be working with cool folks.

Dracos

[Dracos]

Yup, as expected, I'm not supposed to share anything.  Working as a build engineer at the moment and I can say that it is a much different experience organize hundreds of thousands of files versus thousands of files for hundreds of people versus tens of it.  Good way to see how the workflow is optimized to remove these concerns in general from people.

So how are folks non nda'ed stuff going?  Kind of miss getting able to batter details about =)

Dracos

[twentytwo]

Too bad. I would have liked to hear about your experience there. It's always good to hear from people in the industry...

***

Well, as far as development on that game idea of mine is going, I've been set back in the worst possible ways

First of all, I only have Windows 2000, so XNA was out of the question until I got myself a laptop (I should get that in a few weeks).

Second, the company I work at was attacked by a hacker, who stole some private documents. The company's response to this threat: let's block our employees from accessing sites from specified dangerous categories, and this will stop people from noticing us and doing us harm! So, they went and banned all sites holding the categories of Nudity, Weapons, Hate Crimes, Violence, and Games. o_O. Yeah, I really don't get that one, either. Thus, I have lost all access to GameDev, Gamasutra, IGDA, Rpgamer, and... Soulriders. To make matters worse, I program in OpenGL at work, so... this makes my job pretty "interesting" (so glad I bought that Redbook!).

Third, I went and promised some people I'd start a game development club on my college campus. Please refer to point two. >_<


Well, other than that, my summer hasn't been too bad. I've been reading through the XNA book by Nitsche from exDream: it's a pretty good book that demonstrates how to use shaders and provides a pretty good intro to 3D programming using various tools. I don't always agree with his approach, but I guess that's to be expected from any book.

I have also been working out how to design a good story bible for my RPG ideas using Excel and Word. That project's going pretty well, though I really wish I had XP and Vista (my laptop plan: dual-boot!).

Well, I wish you luck at Crystal Dynamics. If you ever get your name in the credits, make sure to tell us about it!

Mazal Tov!
-22

[Dracos]

Will do.  Sounds like a nasty blockade there.  But at least you got the red book to back you up.

Dracos

[Dracos]

What I can say of the moment that may be of interest:

Building something to build code for three platforms is actually a pretty complex task.  I've worked on something like this for the last week or so and there's actually a godawful amount of stuff that goes into just the code side organization.  I've never seen project files this large before and it really makes the tens of megabytes that most of the code for my own game projects were pretty dwarfed.

It's also pretty easy to lose time with a large company.  ...and I'll finish this when I'm not gaming ^^;

[Dracos]

Day 20 or so of build system...

Buildbuild..build build?  buildbuildbuildbuildbuildbuildbuildbuildbuild...

OR something :)

Dracos
dazed.

[Dracos]

Lots of stats these days.  ALmost done with my internship.  Not sure what'll happen after yet.

[Dracos]

So, yeah, since the last post, some several months ago, I've gotten hired. :)

It is really same old, same old at this point, for more virtue of me not really being supposed to talk about it. =)

Launching a major tool used by multiple studios though?  That takes a lot more time than one would guess.