Getting Started
20 October 2019
Intro
Time. Everything takes time. I’ve always wanted to build a game but have never had the time. Well, now, I finally have the time to start exploring.
For my first attempt, I’m going to jump in at a low level. There are of course loads of game engines out there that offer a complete off-the-shelf package. But, I’m going to keep it simple and use stuff that is built-in in .Net. After all, this is a learning project and not a commercial undertaking. Maybe once I’ve battled through the trenches, I’ll feel comfortable enough to let a professionally developed engine do the heavy lifting.
Mechanics
The game will be a simple one. I’m going to have a spaceship onscreen, moving the mouse will apply thrust to the ship in the direction of the movement. In the absence of input, the rocket will experience frictionless inertia with no thought paid to orbital mechanics. The goal will be to capture enough energy cores to activate the jump drive and escape through a portal.
Injecting complexities on top of this original formula will keep gameplay interesting. Some possible mechanisms will be:
- Enemy Ships
- Enemies that fire weapons
- Enemies that lay mines
- Inertialess Enemies
- Impenetrable scenery (e.g. planets)
- The ability to fire back
- The ability to drop mines
- Orbital mechanics
And, I’m sure loads more ideas will arrive during development.
Blog
I plan to keep a blog of worthy discoveries and milestones, of which this is the first instalment.
First steps
The first steps are, unfortunately, the least exciting - setting up version control, the blog, and a ticket tracking system. Drudgery that needs to be done, but has no actual bearing on the deliverables. To keep things simple, I plan to use GitHub for all of these. So that’s today’s task :)