It's been a while, but now it's November I should post another journal entry on my progress on Project Nova.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite made it to the point I wanted to be at. By this time, I wanted to have a ship flying around and shooting, but I still have to figure out the best way to internally represent the game objects (this is more important for the enemies, since they will need to be in formations).
It's taken be a bit longer than I thought for a few reasons; partly because it took a while to get back into the swing of programming, and partly because it takes a while to find the info I need in the tutorials and references I've accumulated. But I've also been a bit slack and not done enough work on this, which isn't really the best way to try and gain the mindset that I'd need if I have a hope of making it as an indie developer. Although my work in real life is picking up again I'll have to make the time to work productively on this.
I'm also spending a bit too long on the forums, so I'll need to cut back. Unfortunately I can't go "cold turkey" and leave the forums altogether for a while because I'll need help for my project, but I will try to only visit when I need to ask a question or post in my journal. I've also banished the Lounge from my Active Topics list, which should help!
Now I've finished with "pages of flaws", here's an update of what I've actually got working in Project Nova. I've been implemetning some of the Enginuity tutorials (the bits I need), tweaking them to my needs. So far I've got the following working:
- Error logging to a file (helps with debugging too!)
- Loading and saving configuration settings to a file
- The main game loop (or kernel)
- Multi-layered background
There's a bunch of more code that just there to help those things, and some other stuff that's incomplete yet.
Here's a screenshot of the current background, entitled "Hey look, I can draw squares with OpenGL!". It looks fairly nice when scrolling, and this screenshot can also make a good tiling wallpaper!
Next on the agenda is to figure out the best way to represent the player's ship, enemies and bullets as an object hierarchy, and then implement that in the game. If I get it reasonably right, it shouldn't take me more than a week to do, so hopefully I'll have another screenshot then.
I'll also need to think of an appropriate bad pun for the next entry's title; this next one is tricky to think of appropriate rhymes [wink]!
