Game in a month – The results
Here are the Linux and Windows builds for Roach Roundup. I finally managed to get the Windows version to link, and barely. I don’t think I’ve ever run into that kind of dependency hell before.
Only four “levels”, no sound, no music, and no gameover/success screen. Hardly an awe-inspiring release. Still I did manage to get a good bit done with the time I had over the past month, and I learned a simply ridiculous amount of useful knowledge, both from doing research during development as well as from my myriad mistakes. Next time, things will be better. It may take two or three games, but these will get fun and polished eventually, I’m promising myself that. And hey, I’ll probably revisit this in a few months when my generalized engine is done and redo it the “right” way.
As for what’s next, I’m not sure. First thing is going to be a good long nap, I’m kinda burned out right at the moment. But not too long. I’m think I’m going to start extending SplashMap into a more robust game editor in a few days after I catch my breath. Currently, it only does maps, but now that I’ve discovered Lua, I realize that with very little effort I can extend it into a full visual game editor, ala gamemaker, but one that uses OpenGL transformed sprites for everything and is tuned to do exactly what I want it to do, and very, very quickly. Most of the engine code is now in place (thanks to Roach Roundup for filling in a lot of the holes), exposing that to the mapper should be fairly easy. I realize after doing Roach that personally, it really helps me to be able to see my work as I’m doing it, bouncing back and forth between code and game design more than necessary just adds frustration to the process unnecessarily. It also makes making changes to the game design hard. Towards the end, I realized that having rooms of varying shapes would have made Roach Roundup 200% more interesting, but because I foolishly took the route of just hardcoding the room shape in instead of finishing the C++ rendering pipe for SplashMap maps, I couldn’t make the change without a prohibitively expensive amount of effort. Live and learn.
Oh, and here are the files in question. The Windows version should work fine on pretty much any 32-bit windows (95 might be a little dicey), the Linux version requires that you have the SDL and SDL_mixer libraries for whatever distribution you happen to use installed. Oh, and OpenGL drivers or else Mesa.
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