Game-a-Week One
- by Matt Christian
Anyone who chats with me on a semi-regular basis knows I am absolutely horrible at completing something from beginnning to end. Often times I'll begin something, lose interest at some point, and end up moving onto the next thing. For example, I have 1/2 a full game created, 1/3 of a novel written, and half of a model set created. Needless to say, unless I have some sort of pressure to finish something I don't stick to it.
Recently however one of my online buddies challenged me to create a simple game. The start date was last Thursday and the final game needed to be delivered by this next Sunday (giving me just over a week). However, I am going out of town this Friday so will need to deliver it by Thursday, giving me exactly 1 week to develop a game. Here is what the game needed to include:
The player should be able to shoot
Shooting things should score points
Sounds very simple, but given a single week to produce all art assets plus the game isn't an easy task. So far I've developed:
An animated Main Menu that loads via script files, allows the user to start a new game or exit the game
The game is 3D and the player can move around the play area with an 'over-the-shoulder' camera
HUD elements are drawn to display the player's current score
When the player presses Esc they are shown a pause menu where they can resume the game by pressing Esc again, or quit the game by pressing Space
There are also 2 items implemented that don't work perfectly:
JigLibX physics library implementation
On the main menu there is an arrow symbol that rotates to always point at your mouse
I've got 2 days of development left so hopefully I can get collision working, some of the art cleaned up, and some more of the camera functionality working. Also, I'll need to take some time to package the game up which hopefully shouldn't take too long.
