Blue Arizona, The Night Land and Robots
As our imaginary readership no doubt knows, we here at the Exrayfactory, specifically under the auspices of the probably superfluous designation Bremsstrahlung Games, have been working on several projects, the one furthest along being code named BlueArizona. BlueArizona tells (is that really the right verb for a video game?) the story of an elderly Tinkerer who, at the behest of some subtle influences, constructs a dimensional transportation device and ends up in a far away land, amongst the ruins of an ancient civilization. His little sphere-shaped craft rolls and bounces around on a force field, the The Tinkerer must explore what will hopefully be a large and well developed world, not only for clues as to where he is and what happened there, but ultimately how to get home.
Objectively speaking, I would say we are approximately 10-20% finished with the task of making this game, despite having passed around now a few amusing demos which I "rapidly prototyped" up in Python.
Since I am responsible for the programming, I have the following plan: I will follow, with some deviations and improvisations, this set of articles by Richard Fine on the construction of a game engine in C++. This course of action is motivated by several factors, the first of which is that I do not really know how to write a game engine, my primary experience being in data analysis with some experience in algorithms. Other factors include speed and a clear distinction between the engine and the scripting system, two things which Python does not provide. To that end, I will be using the very nice Lua Programming Language for our scripting system. In preparation for using Lua, I converted the scripting language in GNU Robots (Guile, a Scheme), an interesting little game in which the player programs a robot to navigate a virtual world, to Lua. The results of this effort can be found here. The source code is released under the GPL, and the included binary is compiled there against a system which has the Lua libraries where an Ubuntu would put them. I am also experimenting with SCons, a build system which we might eventually use to build the whole engine. The source is not extremely complicated and the enterprising young Linux or Windows user might be able to get it to compile. Finally, the C++ engine described in the above articles will be able to serve duty in any number of future Exrayfactory games with some additions and removals, hopefully forming a useful code base. The Night Land in particular should benefit, and if we ever want to take that frightening step into 3d, we will be able to use it then as well.
The other pressing issue about is the actual game design, story flow, elements of play etc etc, which I am leaving hopefully in the hands of my partners in this venture.
I welcome comments about Lua, Scheme, video game engines in general or even Lua Robots.
PS - If I appear to be affecting a peculiar diction its because I have been listening to The Time Machine, By H.G. Wells. I think we might want to read this book, since it has many things in common with the basic story of BlueArizona. What does everyone think?
[Bremsstrahlung]
Objectively speaking, I would say we are approximately 10-20% finished with the task of making this game, despite having passed around now a few amusing demos which I "rapidly prototyped" up in Python.
Since I am responsible for the programming, I have the following plan: I will follow, with some deviations and improvisations, this set of articles by Richard Fine on the construction of a game engine in C++. This course of action is motivated by several factors, the first of which is that I do not really know how to write a game engine, my primary experience being in data analysis with some experience in algorithms. Other factors include speed and a clear distinction between the engine and the scripting system, two things which Python does not provide. To that end, I will be using the very nice Lua Programming Language for our scripting system. In preparation for using Lua, I converted the scripting language in GNU Robots (Guile, a Scheme), an interesting little game in which the player programs a robot to navigate a virtual world, to Lua. The results of this effort can be found here. The source code is released under the GPL, and the included binary is compiled there against a system which has the Lua libraries where an Ubuntu would put them. I am also experimenting with SCons, a build system which we might eventually use to build the whole engine. The source is not extremely complicated and the enterprising young Linux or Windows user might be able to get it to compile. Finally, the C++ engine described in the above articles will be able to serve duty in any number of future Exrayfactory games with some additions and removals, hopefully forming a useful code base. The Night Land in particular should benefit, and if we ever want to take that frightening step into 3d, we will be able to use it then as well.
The other pressing issue about is the actual game design, story flow, elements of play etc etc, which I am leaving hopefully in the hands of my partners in this venture.
I welcome comments about Lua, Scheme, video game engines in general or even Lua Robots.
PS - If I appear to be affecting a peculiar diction its because I have been listening to The Time Machine, By H.G. Wells. I think we might want to read this book, since it has many things in common with the basic story of BlueArizona. What does everyone think?
[Bremsstrahlung]
posted by J.V. Toups at 14:45
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