Reworking my Spaceout Game – Part Two

After playing around with glow effects, I decided to create a solid particle manager. I looked at a few things on NeHe and GameDev for initial ideas. I also have a few books in my arsenal that proved very useful indeed; 3D Game Engine Design and More OpenGL Game Programming. I turned my attention to creating a particle engine that could generate a flame effect for the rocket boosters on my player model and particles that will eventually fly off of smashed bricks, upon collision.

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Reworking my Spaceout Game – Part One

Recently I have been remaking my Spaceout game; the last version I produced used a physics engine that I made in two days for a deadline and as a result, took up more resources than I would have liked.
This time I would be making use of Box2D, which as you may have noticed is the same physics engine that Placeholder games used for our team project. To enable faster and clearer collision detection, I will be using a pre-made engine that I already have experience with.

It was also important to add new gameplay features and generally make the game more fun. I wanted to work in more visual effects, ensuring that my game is running as optimally as possible. For this reason I will be using Graphic Remedy (gDEBugger – OpenGL profiler) throughout.

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Planet Generation : Early Development Blog

One of the projects I have in the pipeline is a planet generation tool/engine for a Space RPG ‘Verse. It will be a 3D game but with only 2 axes of movement. I’m interested in playing around with depth of field effects and positioning objects effectively. It seemed a good idea to start development of the planet generation engine first, having recently completed a research project into real-time terrain generation.

I wanted to produce a visually compelling game, whilst imprinting my own creative style. The nature of space means that most of the time there isn’t much to look at, so I decided to over-emphasise a planet’s features. By choosing procedural generation, less time is spent creating content for the game. In terms of visual style, I was aiming for something between the comic/arty style of Spore and the more realistic look of something like Eve Online.

Single page article.