[Journal] Duke's natural Boy and C

Contests JGO Comp 2009
#1

Hi folks,

Reallife is really busy these days, but I’m going to try to deliver something this competition - it will probably be more like a tech demo than a game though…

Anyway, the story is a little something like this:

One night, Duke, the notorious sleepwalker, finds himself at the edge of a cliff. After a few completely stressed out seconds, he realizes it’s not so bad after all, and he decides to peek down. At that very moment, he can’t resist the urge to sneeze - and his nose flies right off. Not quite mentally stable, Duke jumps right after it. After what seems like an eternity, he splashes into a river. It’s up to you to help duke not only find his nose, but find a bit of glue too. Duke is really frustrated, as this is not the first time this happened, so he calls out for you… again. Only you can save him!

As the name suggests, this game will be about bouyancy - and maybe a few ropes? All physics are implemented by Verlet Integration. All gfx will be BezierCurves around the verlet particles.

I hope I can make it playable, currently the framework and physics take a lot of time.

#2

Ahaha, someone else doing verlet physics. :slight_smile: I’m going to be trying to do the same for some ropes as well.

#3

Ha Ha
What a nice way of having a nose drop!

Good luck, I’ll be watching!

Best regards from

M.E.

#4

Oh boy… I started saturday 8PM, so I guess I started 24h late… :-\

Anyway, just playing around with my brand new verlet integrator:
[x] Duke is properly rendered with curves
[x] Duke is animatable with forces, he breaths, gets up when he fell, yawns…
[x] Water! Currently 4K particles, that Duke can interact with…
[x] Duke properly floats, and gets dragged along by the water

To do:
[x] Prevent Duke from exploding every once in a while.
[x] Add boats and ropes
[x] Build the canyon.
[x] Figure out gameplay…!

(the grey area is the bounding box around the automatically updated bounding sphere of Duke)

#5

wow thsi is a pretty good start, but Youa re gunna be hard pressed to finish in time :wink:

#6

Cool vertlet integration!

So are the water particles flowing over some rock-circles?

#7

Oh well, optimizing water is way too time consuming. It’s now a self-analyzing algorithm that keeps adjusting its gridsize. I doubt I will release anything, and haven’t been productive at all. Playing with Duke is too fun.

Anyway, progress:
[x] added boat
[x] added ropes

Had a good night sleep, too

To do:
[x] gameplay!

For anybody wondering why Duke kept exploding, it was an overly stressed spring in the yawning sequence - who’d have thought that could be so destructive.

#8

Aw you can’t not finish that - it looks far too cool to be left unplayed. :slight_smile:

#9

Yeah all the particle effects and everything are purty.

#10

Ok, I’m definitely not going to finish this one. :-\

Without any experience in games, not having a basic framework is kinda making it impossible to make steady progress. So I’ve just written a basic framework, which should be able to connect everything together. However, I’m a bit tired, and have had enough of it for the time being. I think I’ll release a tech-demo later on, and probably opensource the verlet water code, it’s surprisingly simple - after a few miserable very complex and slow implementations. Currently it’s simply a big grid, that adjusts its cellsize with each iteration, and measures its own performance.

Anyway, it was fun while it lasted, and now I’m going to try to write a very little game, like running from left to right as a primary objective, just to see ‘how it is done’.

Thanks for the encouraging notes on the screenies!