I''m developing my first game and so far I''ve been working on a terrain engine. It occurred to me today that I have no idea what type of game it will be, only that it will involve the use of my engine. Is it ever a good idea to design a game when you''re already coding it? I started the game with the goal of teaching myself opengl but the more I work on it, the more ideas I''m getting just from seeing how the ''game world'' will look. Just wondered what people think, can you make a good game just by designing it as you program it?

It could cause problems because then you say, hey this would be cool and have to rewrite huge chunks of code, whereas is you set your stuff down at the start you''ll be able to code it in as you go. And trust me is a bitch to have recode hundreds of lines of code to add some thing in.

Its not knowing the path but walking it.

quote: Original post by BlueCat
Is it ever a good idea to design a game when you''re already coding it?

Yeah when the game is small. It''s great that you can get new ideas while working on it. But with large complicated projects it can require too many changes in the existing code and because you are lazy (we all are) you start hacking your way around problems instead of solving them. And suddenly your nice clean code has turned into crap and you quit working on it and start up a new project.

quote: Original post by granat
And suddenly your nice clean code has turned into crap and you quit working on it and start up a new project.

It's OK it's all ready crap!

Here's a screenshot, I'd appreciate any ideas you have for a game





[edited by - bluecat on August 17, 2002 5:56:01 AM]

With terrain like that, I''m thinkin a flight-based game...

Maybe one like Dropship? or even BattleZoneII.

~ Dwarf

The gl2D Project | Free programming books

Does the engine render in real time? That would make a difference

It''s nice. It looks like Voxel Space

Looks pretty cool. Generally, its best to design stuff before you go about doing it, so now would be a good time I think to sit down and really plan out the game (in all its gory technical detail) so you have a plan for how to go about coding the rest of it. Then, when you are coding and come up with some more good ideas, you can stop and see how they fit in your plan. If you can fit them in, do so, otherwise, you can skip that feature and not worry about it.

It''s really difficult if you change your mind about something to go back and code it differently. I just had to do that with my project because I designed some of it but didn''t really think about how one part of it would work and now its biting me in the butt.

Most of the time the engine is made for the game, to allow specific gameplay...

Of course some genre don''t really need a new engine (FPS), though some need (Serious Sam with its legions of ennemies).

If you''re working on some kind of tech/learning demo, then you might want to make it more than that afterall, you should look at what it does well, and what types of games can be played with it.

For example, I see your terrain engine being good to play STR, FPS and RPG.
But to make a good engine for a particular genre, you''ll probably want to add a few features.
Also it depends on how fast it''s rendering, and the amount of polys.


-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

the tree sprites need alpha maps, other than that i´d say it looks useful for something that flies... maybe a racer?