Even if the GameDev.net dailies didn't give me enough writing to do on a daily basis and I didn't feel an unstoppable urge to play a bit of Battlefield: Bad Company with some fellow developers and Shackers on a nightly basis I still probably wouldn't have a whole lot to write in the way of a Cubegasm development journal.

Over the course of the last couple of weeks I decided that I was definitely a fan of OGRE as a rendering engine and generally useful program framework so, for a few days, all I did was refactor all of my application code, trim a number of unnecessary bits here and there, and generally get a bit more comfortable with the code base. Once that was done I set about getting the game to work as a Release build; as another developer told me in the comments to my past development journal OGRE performs an absurd amount of validation checking when it's running its Debug build. Setting up the Release configuration with Visual Studio took a bit of time (as I'm pretty anal about project settings) but, once I got it working, I saw a framerate increase of, and this is not an exaggeration, about one-hundred times what the Debug build was offering. It was encouraging, to say the least, as I was a bit concerned about the speeds I was seeing in the Debug configuration; once I saw the Release performance, though, I started thinking that OGRE and I could be good friends for more than a single project.



Now that I have working Debug and Release configurations and a vastly cleaner codebase to work within I'm working on the .FORT XML file which will define entire cube forts; forts will have normal blocks, score multiplier blocks, explosive blocks, random effect blocks, and so on and all of this can be specified in the sample XML file that I prepared (and can be seen below). At this point I have all of the XML data being read in and it's just a matter of getting all of the data added to the game world.



I'm still not entirely sure what kind of game Cubegasm is actually going to be at this point either. Originally I was planning for a player-versus-AI fort combat type of game where each player tried to destroy the other player's fort but the more I get into this project the more I'm contemplating a puzzle/score-whore gameplay hybrid where a player attempts to get the highest score for each "fort puzzle" in the quickest timespan. This particular design would allow me to focus a great deal on the individual designs of the forts and attempt to come up with some really interesting structures which I would give certain "puzzle items" that must either be preserved (kept undamaged through a puzzle), forced to the ground, or destroyed by the player's cube-cannon outright.

That's about it for this entry, though. I just recently got my motivation to work on the game back after a bit of time enjoying the huge number of fantastic games which have come out in the last couple months. I'm in the planning stages for my post-Cubegasm project as well; this one is called Ragdoll Tactics. The mere concept of the game makes me immensely excited but, as per my own rule, I'm focusing solely on Cubegasm until it reaches a state of doneness.

And if anyone else is planning on going to Lollapalooza at the end of the month be sure to note it! Iron & Wine, Rage Against the Machine, Flogging Molly, Nine Inch Nails, John Butler Trio, Brand New, and a bunch of other great bands should make for a fantastic Chicago weekend.