SeaBomb – The Plan
One of the most satisfying things I've ever done in my life was to program a game from scratch. When I was a teenager I wrote an Action RPG using QBasic and assembler language. The project took me years outside of school hours, but it was immensely satisfying, and ultimately was the catalyst that pushed me into the game industry.
Honestly, the story was lame and there was no sound. To put it bluntly, I probably had more fun making it than anybody ever did playing it! I'll let you see for yourself in the video below.
Recently I've found myself with a decent amount of time off, and I want to scratch that game dev itch. I'm doing this for fun, so I'm going to focus on the things that I find fun.
So, here's the plan:
- Design and build a simple top down shooter. This premise will wind up driving all the game engine needs. No skinning on the main character. Skinned background objects can be a stretch goal.
- Build a content pipeline for processing models, and textures.
- Build a game engine that replicated all of the features from my XNA renderer using SharpDX with DirectX 11.
- The engine will be based on entity component architecture.
- Use all open source or free software as I go (with the exception of Windows). I'll be using Blender, Gimp, and Krita for the art.
- Include a few blog posts and tutorials on both art and code as I go.
My elevator pitch would be:
"You fight off the hostile locals on a backwards planet while trying to collect enough fuel to escape to a friendly system."
I had been umming and ahhing over what language to use. Going back and forth between C# and C++. In the end, I want to be able to achieve a lot in a short amount of time, and I'm not really interested in writing custom memory allocators, or optimised math libraries.
To that end, the "fun" factor has won out over anything else. Additionally, I have a large amount of old XNA C# code I can draw from in the form of a deferred renderer I wrote a while back (screenshot below). I really liked XNA, but I want to have a sandbox I can play around with DX11 (and later DX12) with.
Right, so I guess I'm making a game, probably better sit down and design something... Calling dibs on a name now though: "The Antimatter Bazaar".
Wish me luck!