Structures of Game Design

I wanted to start this blog to show case some of the projects I have worked on in school and out. The first project is from Structures of Game Design (SGD). We were assigned to make a game in 2 weeks. The game play wasn't as important as the features that needed to be implemented. For example, Full Screen Mode, Game State Machine, Menu System (which included: main, options, how to play, high score, credits, game play), Background Music, SFX, Pause, Game Tokens (using Object Factory, Object Manager), Event System, Message System, Collision Manager, Win / Lose Screen, Intro Screen, Scrolling Credits, Bitmap Font Manager (text effects), Parallax Scrolling, Select-able Characters (3 minimum), AI Way points, Two Player Simultaneous, Key Binding and of course no compiler errors, no program crash and no memory leaks. I received 110 on this assignment.

My game design was simple; I really enjoy Futurama and have always wanted to make some sort of Futurama game. I wanted something that would be fast and easy to learn. The goal of the game is to destroy the asteroids, and not get shot by your opponent. If you are shot by your opponent, then you lose points, however if you can shoot your opponent, then he loses points.

The assets weren’t that hard to find. Yay, google. I was also able to record the theme song which I felt added that final touch. I held one laptop up to another to record the song. surprisingly it came out rather well.

As for the code, this was the class that introduced singleton’s. Every manager used a singleton, just so I could have global access to it. It made things a lot easier, but its rather unsafe and bad coding practice.

This was also the first time I heard about lerp. I had to find something to lerp. I used a progression bar to indicate the time remaining. I think it came out rather well.

This was the first time that I was able to have free reins of what I wanted to do. Yes there were guide lines, and requirements, but I felt that this game was the first chance I was given to make a game from what I have learned thus far in the game development program.

Let me know what you think. Thanks!