Video Game in a Week -- Day 4

Well, grim news. I have to put this project on hiatus; this is going to take longer than a week, and I plan to finish it sometime over the summer. Right now, I'm just gonna enjoy my spring break. Here's a semi-playable demo*. At the moment, there's no gameplay elements other than maneuvering; there's no dying, no obstacles, etc. I've tried testing MarbleRun on another computer, and the materials turned up black. Not sure how to fix it, but I'll worry about it later. Another curious thing, when you set the direction of the light towards the south-west corner of the map causes the stencil shadows to go crazy. Also not sure how to fix, but I'm pretty sure it may have to do with ProBoolean not liking the level, i.e. a large chunk of the mesh is removed when I try to combine it with a mesh.

*Heh, if I were to call this a game, I'd be in the same boat as "Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing." Therefore MarbleRun stands as a demo.

Instructions:
Move the mouse to orient the camera
Right mouse button sets the light direction
Space resets the player to the start
The keys W, S, A, and D maneuver the marble FPS style.

Requirements:
Visual C++ 2010 RC1 Runtime Libraries (not included with download)

Download:
MarbleRun alpha .3

Video Game in a Week -- Day 3

Made some progress today. Setting up Bullet is taking me longer than expected, but at least I'm making some headway. 3dsmax's pro-boolean tool didn't like the tube in the test level, so I had to re-make that part in order to make a few changes to the tube. The results turned out better than I expected. The overall progress of MarbleRun, however, is slower than I expected and I'm worried if I'll be able to meet all the requirements on time... Also had to battle 3dsmax for a while, took me half an hour to figure out that pressing the space bar during "walk-through" mode locks the pitch of the camera! Grawr!

Screenshot:




Video:

Video Game in a Week -- Day 2

Didn't have much time today to work on Marble Run, had to work today and lots of chores to do. However, of the goals for the day, I accomplished all but the last. I seem to be having trouble obtaining the Ogre wrapper for Bullet. In the meantime, here's how Marble Run is looking:


Here's a 3dsmax rendering of the test level:


Here's what it looks like in game:

Simple directional light with stencil shadows == drool!


I also had a lot of trouble trying to get the materials to show up in Ogre, and it turns out all I was missing was one line of code. Spent more time than I'd like to disclose on getting the materials to show up properly.

Video Game in a Week -- Day 1

Got the whole week off of school; something about a Spring break epidemic or something. Anyways, about sometime last week I thought it would be a really cool idea if I can get a whole entire game completed in a week. After giving it some thought, I figured it would be a great way to pass the time! The game will be titled "Marble Run," a clone of my favorite marble games, Marble Madness and Hamsterball. I'll be programming in C++, using Ogre3D for rendering, OpenAL for audio, and Bullet for physics. Since I've chosen all open-source multi-platform technologies, I plan to make the source available on release.

Here's the target schedule:

• Day 1: Basic application setup with Ogre
• Day 2: Build sample level, integrate Bullet3d
• Day 3: Gameplay elements and menus
• Day 4: Asset creation
• Day 5: Asset creation
• Day 6: Asset creation, polishing
• Day 7: Polishing, release

At the closing of the first day, I have accomplished the day's goal with a simple application, Ogre rendering, FPS-style movement and mouse-look: