My Plans

Recently I've decided to start a game project. I want to expand my knowledge in programming, and to do that I thought that creating a game would be a good idea. Back in January of this year there was an event called NaGaCreMo '09. A person participated in this event by agreeing to complete a game within the first 30 days of 2009. There was a thread about signing up over on the Apollo Forums (better know as TGC Forums), and I joined despite my severe lack of knowledge.

I managed to complete a working demo, but several things were missing from the game. While I had decent gameplay and level design skills, I had no idea on how to go about creating enemies or how to make secret levels, or power-ups or anything that's pretty much standard in today's games. All I had was a marble that could jump from platform to platform, collecting coins to access a gate that led to the next level. So simple, and yet it taught me so much about the fundamentals of game programming.

It's nearly a year later, and I still haven't finished that game. I haven't even worked on it since March, because I came to the conclusion that I needed something. Something that would allow me to create the levels visually and easily, and perhaps make the game even simpler to create in the long run. I needed something known as a  Level Editor, but I had no idea how to go about it. That's changed recently, in the fact that I now have more advanced game creation tools (DarkBASIC Professional), and more diverse knowledge of programming. I studied C# for a bit to learn more about advanced programming, and it definitely helped a lot. I learned about file reading and writing, using classes for object-oriented programming (OOP), and how programs actually work. I plan to switch to C# completely someday; the only reason I'm still using DarkBASIC Pro is so that I can develop my game quickly and get it out of my head ASAP. The quicker that happens, the faster I'll be able to focus on C#.

So, during the winter I plan to program my level editor and game engine. A game engine is essentially something that handles things like physics, collision, and level creation. The only visual part about my engine will be the level editor; the rest will still require programming for things like user input and enemy control, unless I can somehow make the level editor handle enemies (I may be able to do that, if the enemies are simplistic and not too intelligent). Perhaps I should get to work on it now instead of blogging, eh?