My First Game - ShapeWars

When you're only a beginner in game development, it's hard to think of a fun, interesting, challenging, yet not overwhelming idea. More often than not, you're going to make a clone of some other game, be it Mario, Tetris, etc. I saw a few YouTube videos of the infamous game Geometry Wars on the Xbox Live! Arcade and thought it'd be a very perfect fit for a first game.

I spent several months developing my clone, Shape Wars, in C++ using SDL. I had a fairly decent game done, but for a first attempt, as most developers would agree, the code-base was a complete mess. It was impossible to extend or maintain the game in any way. So I started anew. I decided to approach it in a much more professional manner, maintaining a Github, a changelog, a readme, etc.

The release of version 1.0, after a complete re-write was (according to the changelog) on January 13th, 2012. Everything was re-done: the artwork, the music, the level system, the UI, everything. I switched from a level system that read from a file, to one that gradually generated more difficult enemies in increased numbers. I added a (in my opinion) VERY clean menu. From then on, it became a ton easier to maintain everything, but many flaws remained. Even today, there's a really nasty bug in the game that causes a segfault at the most inopportune moments. It has something to do with how I handle bullet and enemy deletion. Pesky std::list and iterators.

Here are a few screenshots:

Main Menu:

In-Game:

Download Link - Github (.zip)

Unwise

Why Start A Blog?

I asked myself this question many, many times before actually beginning. I originally thought it would be extremely time consuming and boring to maintain a dev-blog, but as the change-logs to my games got longer and longer, I felt that starting a blog would make my life easier. This thing should keep me pretty motivated to brainstorm my ideas, release previews, share screenshots, and express my thoughts. Generally, this blog is going to be full of stuff like tutorials, algorithms, code-snippets, screenshots / releases of my projects, and brainstorming ideas about problems I'm having.

My Background

After that, I decided that it was time to leave the turtle of SDL rendering behind and make the jump to 3D. After about a week of experimentation with OpenGL, I realized the amount of math I would need to know for even the simplest game was just too much. Plus, I have absolutely no idea how to use modeling programs, and have no desire to learn. So I retreated back to 2D, except using a mix of OpenGL and SDL. SDL for window and event handling, and OpenGL for rendering. So, with many new-found features at my disposal, I began developing my first full-fledged game: Collapse.
I only got into game-dev fairly recently, maybe a year or so ago. I started out experimenting with Python+PyGame, making simple Snake and Tic-Tac-Toe clones. I felt the curly-brackets calling back to me, so I made the switch to C++ and SDL. The last game I made in purely SDL, ShapeWars, was already pushing the limits of SDL when large quantities of bullets and enemies swarmed. I had to keep all of the game artwork fixed, rotation was simply too slow and not an options.