Project Echos - Update 10-21-11

The project deadline is coming up next week on Tuesday, so I will be doing a post, or possibly a series of posts showing our game design document, gameplay video, uploading an Android .apk file, etc. I'm really excited to finally be finishing up this project, and hope to show a good game. There have been some setbacks in the form of programming problems, but I hope to get the major ones sorted out. I know at least one of my group still wants to work on the game after the deadline to continue adding content and polishing the game more, so we can use it as a major portfolio item, and possibly releasing the full game on the market. I am interested too, pending time constraints.

Learning OpenGL - Part 1

I decided to start teaching myself OpenGL since I have not programmed 3D graphics yet. It took a while to find a tutorial that didn't rely on too many third party libraries, but I eventually found one that I felt relied on the minimum. I am using the tutorials on xoax.net, since they only rely on OpenGL and GLUT. GLUT only deals with starting up OpenGL, is easily accessible, and as far as I know doesn't have a problem with being depreciated anytime soon.

I went through the first couple  tutorial pretty quickly, since they just overviewed OpenGL, and taught me how to draw a line. The third tutorial was a little tricky since I had to create algorithms to create the different parts of an American flag. It seemed simple at first glance but got harder once I realized I was rusty on my geometry, which was a large part of creating a star. It eventually clicked though, and I was on my merry way.

I have included a link to the my source code hosted on my github, which better shows what the tutorial required.

https://github.com/PhaZ90771/XOAX.NET-Tutorial

Project Echos - Midterm Report

As of this Thursday, my group will worked on this project for 5 week, leaving 3 weeks left until it is due. I have worked out most of the underlying systems, but have had to abandon some of them for the sake of finishing the game before the deadline. One such example was loading the maps as external files. This means that all the levels will be more or less hard coded into the games. All that is left is implementing as many levels as we can in the next 3 weeks, and debugging.

Some people in my group have stated their interest in continuing the game after the deadline as a portfolio item, and hopefully reach our original vision of the game. I also have this interest, so I may post more updates after the deadline. If we had more time we would be able to reach our original vision, but the extremely short time frame along with our relative inexperience with some specific aspects, like Lua and Corona, prevents us from reaching it.

As I said with my last post I will show some of the assets for the project, and here they are: