OGE And Game Updates – Alex Peterson

Lots of game dev happening this fall, but most of it has been on our 2D port of the fireflies web game we made for the CDN contest last summer. The team at Bearhanded (where I work) decided to take our web game and make it a mobile game to be released before Christmas. Needless to say we decided to vastly expand on the original game, adding many more game objects, levels, pizzaz and eye candy yada yada.

Do you recognize the first level from our web version?

The graphics got a major overhaul, and as a minor note the characters in these Beta screenshots do not represent the final characters – those are still in progress. We also decided to have 3 trees in the initial release; the first tree has daylight levels in the middle of the day, the second tree levels take place at dusk and the third at night, which means we’re going to add a whole new aspect to the game – dynamic shadows and lighting!

This level is ALL developer art, but it shows the colored lights and shadows effects.

There will also be pulley systems, bounce pads (disguised as red mushrooms), sap that you can sink into, enemy pushers, bombers, moths, worms, tubes, torches, cannons and maybe even more if we don’t say “when” soon. We’ve added so much that we had to push back our release till early 2013.

This will be our companies first iOS game release so we’re trying not to get our hopes up and just to make a game we all can be proud of, though recouping our investments would be nice.

Ye OGE (Open source Game Engine)

ye link
While all this 2D stuff has been going on, I’ve been working with Ralph on upgrading the libraries OGE uses and improving on the CMake build system. At this point, it appears to be working on windows 7 and linux, but not on OSX.
What’s been holding back progress on the planet? Well, I’ve kinda decided to give OGE a real run for the money and see if I can’t make it work before giving up and rolling my own, simpler game engine. I’ve got the latest planet stuff running in OGE, and have been creating sample projects to track down various major bugs like random thread/memory crash bugs and physics stutter bugs. Ain’t no fun to play a game that stutters and I’ve noticed that stuttering seems to be a common problem when working with physics engines. If you’re a physics or threading guru I would love for you to take a look at those parts of the OGE code.

This is my temporary MyGUI implementation in my planet test suite with the latest OGE (bogey tracker broken in this build!)

This is my little physics sample that I hope will help me nail the stutter bugs.

I’ve also added a version of the OGRE profiler to OGE and added optional profiling blocks to all the major systems for now. It doesn’t really work like I would like, but it’s better than nothing for now.
No fav games of 2012 post because I mostly just play one game – Natural Selection 2! They finally released it and it is super fun.