It has been over a year since I started working on "Alien Planet" which is an RPG game written in C++, and uses OpenGl for graphics acceleration. Working on a game is such a time consuming process especially if you are not working with a team and have to do everything yourself. Time went into the following:
- Developing code to simplify the use and access of OpenGL, and make the project sprite friendly. This took about a month or so.
- Developing the sprite sheet: this took over 4 months. I ended up using MS. Word, and Gimp for that.
- Developing code to simplify the keyboard and controller input.
- Developing a map rendering engine.
- Developing a map editor.
- Developing map save, and map load routines.
- Working on the splash screens, and profile selection.
- Profile load/save, and map navigation.
- Sound effects, and game music, which are done using LMMS, and Audacity, with recording from the mobile phone.
- Developing code to implement a Finite State Machine model which is used to control enemies.
a screen shot of the result is shown below:
The engine isn't finished yet, and features and bug fixes are being added while developing the game maps.
Currently the game has two maps/screens. More maps will be added later on, however the progress of the game is very slow since I work on it an hour or so every few days.
Next things to do are:
- Fixing a bug with audio which picking fruit.
- Fixing the start motion of the yellow enemies.
- Fixing the rendering of tiles near the edges.
- Adding the save slot option to the game instead of auto saving to the profile.
- Allow the user to exit the game via the controller.
- Adding option to make the fruit re-spawn.
