Burstin' Bubbles v1.0 (downloadable)

After a while without posting ( I was busy coding and playing Far Cry 3 ( best game ever! ) ), I am happy to tell you that version 1.0 of Burstin' Bubbles is done! It's a playable game, downloadable here (~5MB via Dropbox). It works on Windows 7, not sure about other Windows versions, but should work as well. It features a simple Shoot 'm Up in which the player has a machine gun and Medipacks laying around the city (currently filled in...

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Coding the Bubble (Part 5 - Major additions!)

It's been 4 days since I've posted anything, but I've done loads of work in the meantime. I've added sounds, HUD, replaying of level, loading screen, graphical update of the character, spawning enemies that will follow you, feedback on the enemies indicating health, added Medipacks(which heal 50%), a brand new environment with some graphics, added a MathHelper class with functions as Random(), Normalize(), etc., 2 types of collision (rectangular(somewhat...

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Coding the Bubble (Part 4 - Shooting the enemies)

I've made some major improvements to the functionality (and the graphics!). I've implemented mouse-aiming,  shooting of enemies (they die after 10 shots), enemies looking at the player, bullets with an owner, major improvements to the organization of code. I got the polymorphism to work and now I update all objects with one Vector. I also implemented a GetType() function in the GameObject (and deriving classes) to easily check what types are...

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Coding the Bubble (Part 3 - Basic Collision & Shooting)

Implementing basic collision went almost as smooth as I had expected. Had some problems with keeping the objects separated from eachother when there is a collision. I used a radius-based collision system, which basicly means; when the distance between two objects is smaller than the radius of one, there is a collision. When there is a collision, I keep the two objects from interpenetrating eachother by displacing object A (the player) in the direction...

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Coding the Bubble (Part 2)

I've been busy lately, not so much with programming, but more with my temporary job before I go back to school. Takes a lot of time, but I get payed for it, so it's not that bad. For the programming part, I haven't done a lot. I struggled a lot with setting up a derived class from the GameObject-class. I kept trying to call the GameObject constructor from the Player's constructor, but it removed the texture every time I tried, so now I have duplicate...

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Coding the Bubble (Part 1)

Hi there and welcome to my second series of posts about my intake assignment for the NHTV Game Programming study. I've written several posts about the design process and if you haven't read those, here's part 1! Apparently, this assignment isn't mandatory if you are able to come to an interview. I'm doing it anyway, just to showcase what I can and hopefully don't even have to do an interview. I'm not afraid of that interview, but I just want to be...

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Brainstorming about Bubbles (Part 3)

As I mentioned in my previous post, this post will be about the goals and how to accomplish those of the "Burstin' Bubbles" game. Step 8. Defining the goals for the player There should be an overall goal for our player, a goal that will make the player want to play the game and to make clear why the player has to do missions and perform certain actions. To achieve this goal, the player has to achieve a certain goal for each level. So, we need a main goal and goals per level. End goal The end goal of the game will be to prevent the collapse...

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Brainstorming about Bubbles (Part 2)

Continuing on the post I wrote yesterday, Brainstorming about Bubbles (Part 1), I will make some more decisions and brainstorm some more about elements to be used in "Burstin' Bubbles". Status OK, this is what I have so far; I will make a game in C++ (with SFML) called "Burstin' Bubbles" involving levels based on historical economic bubbles. I still don't have any idea what the mechanics will be, how long the game should be playable, what...

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Brainstorming about Bubbles (Part 1)

I've already begun brainstorming for the NHTV intake-assignment with the theme "Bubbles". I will explain the very short brainstorm-process I had, with colorful images and explanations of said process. Step 1. Write stuff down! Write down stuff about bubbles. Basically making a word-web, only more colorful and more messy. It works though. As you can see (and if you can read it), I wrote down words involving Bubbles, but also some things relevant...

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Intake assignment for NHTV

Last Saturday I went to the view day of the NHTV to look at the IGAD-programmes. After a three hour travel I arrived in Breda, accompanied by Luc. We walked through the school to check out some student work and hear presentations about the Programming-courses and the 3D Visual Art-courses. I was mindblown by the quality of work delivered there and the Programming-courses fit and completed my dreams and ideas of what a capable Game Programmer should be able to do. Not only are there courses to teach Mathematics, C++ Programming, but also stuff like...

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The Clockwork Asset Builder

Here is another update on the level editor I'm making. I had some struggles with the WinForms and XNA combination, because I couldn't use the Content Pipeline the way I was used to. When you ran the program, it build all the assets with MSBuild in a temporary directory and removed those when you closed the program. This did allow me to use the assets, but the loading time became higher and higher if I added more assets.  Changing the build...

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My portfolio in short

Instead of making an entire site to show some videos about projects I've done so far, I will post it here. Much more user-friendly and compact! Most of my work was made at the USAT, during my two years of enrollment. That's where I picked up programming (so that means I've started programming two years ago!), by making a Flash game. Which I unfortunately lost due to a human error on my FTP server. If anyone reads this: MAKE BACKUPS and not on...

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Clockwork Age - Camera controls are done!

I finally got the camera controls to work properly. The orbiting, panning, zooming, scrolling and keyboard-movement now work the way I planned. All the movement is done in the CameraMan-class, a member of the Camera-class. The problem was that I couldn't get orbiting around an object to work without messing up rotations. After a lot of googling I found a useful way to accomplish this. The idea of setting the position to a transformed Vector3.Backward...

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Clockwork Age

Clockwork Age is a project I am doing with a friend of mine, as preparation for the study we want to do at the NHTV in the Netherlands. I am aiming for the Game Programming-direction and Luc is aiming for the 3D visual art. We both stopped our study at the Utrecht School of Arts & Technology, because we both disliked the way the school treats its students, we both wanted to specialize something. We chose to do this after completing two full...

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The initial commit

Yay, my first post on my very first devblog! First of all, let me introduce myself. I am Eric Polman, a student of at the moment of writing 19 years old. I live in the Netherlands in a small town called Eemnes. My interests lie in computers, games, game design, game programming, web development, web design, 3D art, listening to music and partying. That's practically everything I do, apart from my basic needs. I will use this blog to keep readers up to date about my current projects including Clockwork Age (a project I'm doing with a friend of...

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