24/01/2021 – Space Cart Demo, C++ Progression, & New Project

Dog got spayed back in December, she’s doing great.

There is a new Space Cart demo, you can play it at the itch.io link below.

The new demo fixes up a lot of the issues were complaints the last time I made the demo. New navigation UI, better menus, more sounds, music, infinite scrolling, parallax scrolling, and so on. The demo has been out for a while now and I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback on it, the most notable being that the PC controls are kinda broken.

The next milestone for me is going to be in November of this year. Originally I wasn’t planning on continuing development for Space Cart because I honestly wasn’t enjoying playing it when testing stuff. But seeing other people playing it, giving me feedback, and offering ideas; it rejuvenated desire to continue. Follow the game on Itch if you want regular updates on its development.

In C++ news, I finished going through the C++ Programming In Easy Steps book that I’ve had since Uni, and honestly, C++ is nowhere as intimidating as it used to be for me. OK, pointers are still a bit weird to me, but at least I understand them now. Not entirely sure where I would use them in my own programming problems, but it’s good to know.

With that out of the way, I want to get revenge on my old 3rd year project of trying to make a music visualiser. It’s been a mental weight on my mind since Uni that has been dragging me down since. So I’m gonna start over and properly build it this time with my new found knowledge.

Not decided on what APIs I’ll use, but SFML is still around and is originally based in C++, so that’ll probably be a my starting point.

As for the “New Project”, it’s significantly more complex that anything I’ve made so far. Several orders of magnitude more complex and requiring a lot of skills that I haven’t been in touch with for several years.

It’s a fighting game. 3D fighting game with Z-axis movement (Not fully, but some. Think Tekken or DoA). The unique hook is that it doesn’t require complex button presses or input timings. It’s more focuses on positioning, blocking, and dodge timing. The second aspect is that it features stance changing. I won’t go too deep into the details, but that’s the main idea.

The first bit of work I’ve done on it is building a series of animation states within Unity, and getting started with the 3D animation. The latter is the challenging part, even getting the character moving is proving to be challenging.

The new project isn’t really a project anyway, it’s more of a prototype I’ve had kicking around for a few months now. Curious how well it’ll go. It most likely won’t go well.

For my final point this post; I’m doing Global Game Jam this year. Because it’s remote this year it makes it a lot easier to be convinced to go do it this year. ThreeThingGame a couple months back got me interested in joining in on jams again, so I’m looking forward to burning myself out again.

I will try and stream as much of it as I can, and I will do a blog post after the event. It starts on January 28th and ends on the 30th. I hope it goes well.

-Adam