Again, I intend to take part in this glorious event… unfortunately, I didn’t finish any of my last entries on this, since I lost the motivation to work on the games midway… a good idea is usually very important to me to finish a game, and I feel my latest ideas with the themes at hand were crap…

Anyway, rooting for “Survival”, but I won’t get my hopes up, since it never pans out!

I’m going to use my old framework (the same I’ve been evolving for these competitions, while keeping within the “no-gameplay code” rule)…

You can download it from here, if you’re interested… it has a couple of test applications so you can see how it works… It features:

• D3D9 initialization and some helpers
• FMOD interface for sound
• 2d Sprites (with sprite caching, etc)
• 2d Particle System
• Text
• 3ds file loading (only tested with 3ds generated by 3d Studio Max). Loads lights, meshes and cameras.
• Small simple math library (vectors and quaternions)
• Simple 3d camera handling system (just with a “look at” operation)
• XML loading/saving (might come in handy for configuration files, load/saves, etc. The XML loader was created by Frank Berghen, not me… the writer is all me, although the loader also has save functions, but I’m too lazy to figure out how they work)
• 3d particle system (based on the 2d one, so very rudimentary)
• 3d sprite system (quads that always face the camera)
• LUA library support (it’s actually ripped from my engine, so it’s a good support system for LUA)… Last time I used cutscenes and scripting, and loads of the game code was much simpler because of that…
• DDS image loading for an offscreen buffer (just supports A8R8G8B8 images). Might be useful for some level design stuff, although I’ll probably go back to my old days of text files.
• 3d Tilemap (Kind of a blocky heightmap with an automatic texture atlas generation and partition of the map in chunks for possible culling (not implemented)).
• Simple geometry generation (quad, cube, spheroid, caps and cylinders)

The tools I intend on using are:

On the tools side:

• Visual Studio 2010
• Photoshop CS5 (for 2d graphics and textures if I decide to adventure into 3d, and for map creation, etc)
• 3d Studio Max (for modelling if I go 3d, or for title screens and such otherwise)
• sfxr (or Bfxr) (for audio effects)
• Live Writer for blogging

Still don’t know what I’m going to do about music, but I’ll figure that out if I get to that point… I’m also probably going to try to structure the project better than usual, by making an initial timeline, scheduling my pauses, etc… Want to see if that improves my workflow…

So, good luck everyone! And may “Survival” win! 😀