Cities in the Sky

It’s a small triumph, but I’ve now got a working high score table into which you can enter humourous names when you win. Yippee! It looks rubbish, but frankly I’m more concerned with getting things working at the moment, rather than making them look nice. It stores scores in a simple text file, so if you find the game too hard you can easily give yourself a stupidly high score to make people like you more. That’s a feature, not a fault. Hopefully I’ll have a slightly prettier picture ready later today, if I get this next thing done before I start drinking…

Well, I got fed up with the crappy thing I was doing all of yesterday (just some under-the-cover stuff), and went ahead and implemented points. Currently it’s very simplistic (each house gives 1 point per second) and there’s no saving of high scores, but I really wanted to get something interesting on the screen. Yes, it looks rubbish, but the whole thing took me 10 minutes to do

Blegh, programming is so rubbish. Computers are rubbish. Why are they so stupid all the time? They should just bow to my will and accept it.

Well, I’ve been promising to write a little bit about the game for a while, so I figured I may as well get it done now, before you lot lose interest So, here goes… the game in brief:

The best “like X but with Y” comparison I’ve heard so far, and the response I tend to get from people when I talk about the game, is “So it’s like Tetris mixed with Sim City?”. It’s not a bad description, I suppose.

Basically, you’re a god (cliche, I know) responsible for building on this floating island. You’re tasked with keeping the people happy. The people are happier when they have certain buildings, laid out in a certain way. Unfortunately, you can’t just place things as you please, as you also have to balance the island - too many heavy buildings on one side and it could well tip and fall out of the sky. The buildings come one by one from the sky (there’s the Tetris part), and you have to arrange them so as to keep the people happy and the island balanced (there’s the Sim City part).

There’ll be interesting additions to this, of course - a little bit of physics thrown in will make falling buildings and the like pretty fun, and I’m quite looking forward to implementing natural disasters Hopefully all this will be a stupendously large barrell of laughs and will cause orgasmic pleasure in anyone that plays the game. Or maybe it’ll just be me that likes it, I don’t know. We’ll see!

Currently I’ve done the island, a building, and lots of back-end stuff. There’s a long way to go indeed, but I’m pleased with my progress so far. Rest assured I’ll be plugging away at this for some time, and I’ll be updating this blog every time something worth showing off happens. Stay tuned, folks

Well, lookee what we got here! The game came down with a nasty bug just before Christmas, but after a little TLC from me it’s back on its feet again, and better than ever

There’s now a little user input - you can choose where to place buildings as they fall from the sky - and multiple buildings can be placed. It’s not a game yet, but for the first time, it feels like it’s going to be!

Next on the agenda is tidying up the horrible mess my ill game left behind, then onto a bit of physics. This island’s going to become very unstable very soon.

Looks like I won’t be finishing buildings as I said earlier; I started on the booze early and Chicken Run is on telly, so I think I’ll take it easy tonight, and work will most likely recommence on Boxing Day.

Merry Christmas, everybody

Yup, they’re working properly. Unfortunately it looks like the model’s coordinate origin is in the centre of the model rather than at its base, which means the model is sunk into the ground somewhat… that doesn’t matter though, as I’ll be using my own models when I get round to the arty side of things.

Next on my list is a little bit of ‘gameplay’. Well, not really, just the ability to place buildings as they fall from the sky. More pictures later

Well, I’ve been busy tapping out code most of today (in amongst picking up my little sister for London and going Christmas booze shopping), and have managed to get buildings worked into the game! There’s lots of ‘todos’ sprinkled throughout the code, but for the most part I’m very satisfied. I tried it out with one of the OGRE default house meshes, and here’s what I got:

Yay! But where’s the island…? Hrmm… Looks like I need to learn a thing or two about scale; the island is actually inside the house, it’s about the size of that little barrell you see in the corner… A problem to solve tomorrow, I feel

Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned little sister sleeping downstairs, and the ridiculous network layout of my house, I won’t be able to write about the game properly until tomorrow, so you’ll just have to wait

Well, looks like implementing buildings will take a little more thought than I anticipated. Putting them on the island is easy enough; just get OGRE to create the mesh and set its position. I could whip up a screenshot of that in a couple of minutes. Unfortunately that’s really unhelpful, and I don’t like kidding myself

No, there’s more to it than that - and if I ignore one part of it, it may mean rewriting things unnecessarily down the line. I’ve got to plan it so buildings are detachable, so buildings can have different footprints, so the coordinate systems of the mesh, physics system and the grid the island is composed of match up somehow, and most importantly I have to plan it so the code for doing all this is manageable. Thankfully the knowledge I’ve gained from my excellent Computer Science department (hmm…) will aid me!

Anyways… I’ve almost got a good method worked out, scribbled on my notepad, and I’ll likely have *something* worthy of a new screenshot by tomorrow. Luckily, in doing all this extra stuff, progress should be quick in other areas later. Which is nice. Oh yes, and I’ll write a little about what the game will be tomorrow, too. Promise

Right, well I can’t be arsed with flickr (it seems to be part of Yahoo), so I shall use Blogger’s own image upload service for now. Without further ado, here are the first two screenshots taken from the game:

Today I’ve been working on making the island itself look not rubbish. The first shot is pretty much what I had last night, the last is what I’ve got now. Unfortunately there’s still a little glitchyness at the edge of the island (the rock looks very stretched), but I know exactly why and I’ll get it fixed when there’s nothing more important to do.

Tomorrow, I’ll get working on adding buildings, and possibly a little bit of user interaction. I’ll also find a little time to write about the game, since the screenshots don’t really say a lot!