Battleheart: The Game (Pirate cartoon game)

[JP]

Firstly i'd best say who Battleheart are, they're a Scottish Pirate Metal band that i recently did an EP cover for and then approached them with an idea for a small game based on the tin can alley idea:



What my main focus for this project is, is to try and move away from a reliance on Irrlicht for doing things that games companies would like me to be able to do myself, such as collision detection etc. So it's just gonna be a simple and hopefully quick game to try and learn and implement those sorts of things. I havn't got much so far but i thought i'd start up a thread anyway!

Here's the website for the game: http://javierpickle.googlepages.com/battleheartgame

and here's 2 current screenshots:




I plan to have at least two modes of play, one where you shoot at other ships with a cannon and another where you shoot at pirates and wenches etc, probably not with a cannon, some piratey hand held weapon like an old pistol or rifle.

Download v0.6 (10mb) (last updated 5/6/08)

There are 2 versions of the game now. One runs off DirectX 9 and the other off OpenGL, so if the DX9 one crashes, try then OGL one and that should tell us whether the problem is DX9 being installed/broken or not. Also, if it closes without warning then you can check the log.txt file for a description of why it closed which of course you can post here to let me know! If the program crashes and says it's done an illegal operation then before clicking anything on the popup about sending error reports, Alt-Tab to the Command Prompt window and tell me what the last thing says.

[3ddev]

For only a day of work that is pretty good! Does it use Irrlicht at all? And why would you want to impliment new collision detection classes and such when Irrlicht already has them( even though they are primitive ) I don't think companies would care! Anyways, good work, JP. I hope you post more screenshots in this thread!

[JP]

Yeah it uses Irrlicht for all the rending and stuff, but the games companies i'm applying to definetly care about your 3D math and games programming skills, and they want you to be able to do collision detection and all that malarky and not just rely on libraries to do it all for you!

[JP]

Just uploaded a first playable demo of the game (link in my first post in this thread), there are moving targets and ya can shoot em with a big cannon

You can press V at any time during the game to toggle between the shooting of pirates and wenches to the shooting of ships, though you can't actually shoot the ships yet. Pressing escape will exit the game, mouse aims and left click fires, that should be all ya need to know!

Still much to do and any comments/suggestions (positive/negative) would be greatly appreciated

[miko93]

Nice one.

I really enjoy this "shooting stuff" thing after coming home from work.

[bitplane]

yarr!!
really nice graphics, I couldn't bring myself to shoot the wenches.. i prefered to watch them sail by!

[JP]

Heh, that's probably going to be the point eventually, hit the lovely wenches and you lose points

[omaremad]

I havent dled the game yet but i sure will!

Is java deving that fast, i assume you used java in this one. I never belived that java and .ent and all thes thing make devoloping easier nad faster but you might be the proff to convince me, yet again not many people make many games in a short time space like you.

Btw paul nettle's colldectect paper is pretty easy, it might help you on the theory however just ignore all the fuss he makes about elipsion space it confused me, just use spheres or scale your colldetect trimesh instead.

With scrolling targets in your game you can use opengl polygon detect functions which are easy but very limited.

[JP]

Cheers for the advice there, will look into it!

I'm using C++ now for all my projects as that's what you need to use in the games industry, i used java before beacuse that's what they taught us at Uni, no C++! Not sure what you mean by the dev speed of java, in my mind there's little difference between C++ and Java. Sure there's pointers, differences in the way you use strings, memory management etc. But other than that it's all the same and so the dev time would be about the same i'd think!

[3ddev]

Java in is a LOT slower. Maybe for the pointers and such, the actual call time may be the same, but the Java runtime envirement creates a huge slowdown. The biggest difference is when the game initializes. It is like waiting for .NET 2.0 to get started. Once up and running, the game speeds up a little, but c++ for me is by far faster. Java's cross-platform support seemed really cool to me when I first began programming some xx years ago. However, other than the speed, I felt I couldn't expect users to download a 20meg Java env just to play a 5-10meg game! I know some people prefer Java, but there are VERY few commercial games powered by Java; an indicator that it really isn't a great choice for all apps. I think universities choose to teach Java because:
A: Cross-platform. Students can be expected to use different platforms and so Java is ideal
B: Java is like a cross between c++ and something like c# or Visual Basic .NET. Java doesn't have the power of c++, but it does have the more "easy" structure found in the .NET languages. After completion of univ, students will find it easy to migrate to either "high-level" or "low-level" languages as a result.
C: Java runs on the web. This is one feature that Java is sure unique. Maybe asp.net is almost there, but java applets sure are a big plus. However, coding an applet is totally diffent than coding a real Java app. So basically they are two diffent things.

These are just my ideas. Maybe when Java is already installed on more platforms other than the Mac, it will perhaps pick up more interest. Up until then, I will stick with c++ which everyone can compile and run!

[JP]

Yeah totally, Java is known to be slower than C++, probably mainly cos it takes care of a whole heap of stuff itself like memory management etc.

But we were talking about the development time, atleast i was was anyway

I've left uni pissed off that they didn't teach me any C++ cos now it's making it very hard to get into the games industry as i've only been learning C++ for a few months so the games companies think i suck at it

But Java was easy to learn, it's good for the reasons you said, and it's just easier to learn than C++ i think because you don't have pointers or memory management to mess you about when you're just a n00bie!

[JP]

Just updated the download file and screenshots to v0.2. Not a huge amount of difference, just a main menu (of sorts) and some improvements to the gameplay, especially in the fact that you can now shoot the ships if you choose that option in the main menu.

The aiming & shooting needs some working on still, but it's good enough for the moment to try it out!

[JP]

Updated it again as apparently v0.2 crashed for some people. Now there's some measures in place to try and track down the reasons for a crash, though they're not exhaustive i'm sure!

[JP]

And another upload, check out the updated screenshots to see that it's changed quite a lot now!

Ships shoot back at you now and there's some nice preloading screens and a nice menu system.

[bitplane]

cool, getting better
bug for you: it crashes when i click on the intro screen (before loading screen)