a work in progress shmup
I’ve been building a small 2d game engine for a while now. It grew organically out of my first fumbling attempts to learn OpenGL. Over time I’ve added new features like sound and animation as I learnt new things. I’ll probably never finish the “engine” as such, just keep using it as a way to learn new things along the way. This engine will probably be the base for most of the games you see posted on this blog.
The current test application for the engine is an endless shmup. Waves of ships come at you, you shoot them down while dodging bullets. It’s mindless simple fun!
Click here to play via webstart.
The 194x like ship graphics are from a GPL graphics pack long forgotten. Most of the other graphics are from the awesome and amazing classic Tyrian.
invasion – a slightly gory space invaders like game
My third and last entry into the previously mentioned game development challenge is invasion.
Click to launch invasion via webstart.
This game is the most unfinished of the bunch; It doesn’t feature sound/music or a numerical score.
In the game, the invaders don’t shoot, however once you shoot them a little helpless spaceman pops out and gravity takes over. The falling spacemen slowly chip away at your bases and it’s also game over if one clips your ship. It’s fairly comical to see the little spacemen splat for some reason, so this game is fun to play for a few minutes.
planetesimal – an asteroids clone
My second entry in the video game development challenge I mentioned in the last post is a clone of Asteroids.
Launch planetesimal via Java web start.
I like how this one turned out for a number of reasons:
- It’s reasonably “complete” with music, high scores and a start/end
- It’s fun to play for a couple of minutes at least
Success!
warpball
I participated in a video game development challenge mid this year. The end goal was to create 8 small games in 16 weeks. Two weeks for each game is a fairly short timeframe (especially for those working jobs) so the guidelines encouraged you to “remake” old classic games, like Pong, Asteroids etc. The short release times also shifted focus from “creating the biggest best game ever” to just practicing the skill of releasing something. A very important skill.
My entry for the first game is warpball (A remake of Pong). It’s written in Java and uses the lwjgl for OpenGL bindings.
Click to launch warpball via webstart.
Given that it’s constructed using Java, this should work on OSX, Windows and Linux.