Hello Community,
I've done a couple of games in the past, but for about two and a half years I did neither have the time nor the motivation to code anything. But about half a year ago I started a new project. Originally it was my "winter time project" but obviously the usual happened: took way longer than expected ;)
What I have written in this time is a marble racing game.
Before I go a bit into detail here are some links:
https://dustbin-online.de/download/marbles3.zip
The game features 4 game modes:
- Time Trial: race against the clock. In this mode you can also race against previously recorded laps aka "ghosts". At the moment you can race against your own ghosts but I'll add a feature to race against shared "ghosts", previously recorded laps
- Splitscreen: up to 4 players can play on a single computer via splitscreen. This feature need some performance improvements though
- Net Server: host a network game for up to 4 players
- Net Client: play over the network against up to 3 other players
Stunt Marble Racers 2 features a replay system: you can save replays of your races in all modes, and you can save ghosts to race against later on in the time trial mode (no respawn must have happened if you want to save a lap as ghost)
Mainly for the split screen mode I included an awesome feature: you can connect you smartphone as a game controller. For this to work both the computer running the game and the smartphone (or tablet) must be in the same network, and the controller must be able to see the computer running Stunt Marble Racers 2 (which means that you need to be in a private Windows network)
Here is a demo video of that feature (sorry for the poor quality):
As an alpha feature you can upload your ghosts to https://dustbin-online.de/marbles3/, and of course you can download ghosts of others there as well. The ghosts are stored in the "roaming" folder (C:\Users\[UseName]\AppData\Roaming\DustbinGames\Marbles3\Ghosts). When uploading ghosts the files are verified before being available. Not all verification is yet implemeneted.
On the technical side.
- Using the Irrlicht 3d engine (just because I know it rather well) with some code snippets from the engine's forums
- Using Irrklang for sound
- Using the ODE physics engine for the "simulation" (needs some more fine-tuning)
- Network communication is done using websockets (self-implemented)
- the smartphone controller is written in HTML/JavaScript
I still have some features to implement:
- add the ghost / replay sharing to the program
- implement standalone server (and host public servers on the net)
- some link to facebook (to share ghosts / replays and to play public servers)
I hope you like the game and give me some feedback.
