Updates:

Not An Artist Becomes an Artists, Maybe…

It has been quite the year. I have had many life changes and it’s made it hard to get work done regularly. All of this change is about to pay off. For the first time in years I have a regular schedule again! I am going to use that time to get a lot of work done on the Tower engine.

I have not been idle in all this time. I have been pushing myself to learn more about Art than I ever thought I could. You see, as a child, I once dubbed myself Not an Artist. I had been having fun drawing in school, I guess. I really liked to draw 3D cubes and far away scenes. I felt like my art was ok.

Then I started trying to draw faces and people. I remember one day I attempted to draw a family member. I had been practicing and was excited to show off my skills. I could see the disappointment in their eyes. I knew they knew that I knew that it sucked. I remember feeling pretty devastated by the experience, probably through no fault of the family members at all. My pride was wounded.

I dubbed myself NOT and Artist. No, I was a Math kid from that day on.

Later, in High School, I did take an art class. I remember at the beginning of the class, the teacher proud announced that they had see success from all levels of students. That anyone could learn to make art.

I took that challenge. I really applied myself in that class. By the end of the class, the teacher informed me that I had taught them something that year. An important lesson, the teacher said. They had learned that there were, in fact, some people who could never learn how to make art. And I was, in fact one of them, the first they had ever seen. They let me know that they had never seen art so bad in their whole life, and that I really should just give up.

My teachers at school were horrible. It’s probably why I dropped out in 10th grade.

Fast forward to 2015. I decide that I want to make video games, but I don’t have any friends who are artists. I decide to see what it would take to try learning again. I got some books, some online classes, notebooks, pencils, a digital drawing tablet and I mustered all the courage I had.

I started drawing circles, lines, shapes and 3D forms. I’ve been at this for a long time. I learned about the 8 head proportional system, and about dynamism of form. For a long time, it’s felt like I really could never do it.

I just kept going through. I just kept doing page after page after page of just circles, lines, ellipses and shapes.

I started a new job, and the training was pretty long. There was a lot of time during the day where I was listening to lectures, and I needed to be doing something with my hands to focus. I picked up my notebook, and just started doodling sketches.

Instead of just doing pages of circles, I started doing pages of human stick figures. Skeletons. Construction forms used to practice really. I think the results are starting to look pretty good.

It turns out I might actually become an Artist. It really did just require some more practice.

Take that horrible high school teacher!

Here are some examples of what I have been drawing and working on.

A coding update!

Now that I have a regular schedule, complete with weekends again I have been dedicating as much of my time as I’m able to game development again. The engine is progressing well.

Here’s a list of things I have recently completed.
– Added in Mouse and Controller support to Zipper, a flight simulator used by young pilots in Project Philos. Flying feels more natural now. 
– Added a better end of game condition. When the Zipper reaches the end of the map, it stops moving, and the console prints out “YOU WIN!”. 
– I added a refactored Physics System. This is the first big step in getting physics to be complete.

Here is what the engine still has remaining.

– Physics (Rigid Body Dynamics)
– Collision Detections
– Polish UI Text Rendering
– GUI buttons
– Entity Spawner
– Entity Transform Editor
– Entity Property Editor
– Map Editor 
– 3D Animation System
– Lighting System
– Advanced Rendering
– Audio System

With all of these system complete, the engine will be “done”. That is, I’ll be ready to start working on assets for the Philos game project. 

I hope with my new job and a steady routine that I’ll be able to get through this. I’m getting close, closer than ever before. I plan to share updates more regularly. 

Before my next post, I am going to record some game play footage, and upload it to a Super Bad Games youtube channel. I am getting far enough along in the game play that it is going to get more interesting to see the game, rather than just hear about it.

I’m also hoping by later this year, maybe by Summer to have a demo that can be downloaded and played. Soon, I’ll have a game ready to release!

Thanks for reading! Leave a comment if you want to know more about any of these topics!

Life becomes chaotic sometimes for all of us, and August was a crazy one for me. I wasn’t able to get very much done. I’ve been reading up on physics mostly, which is kinda of boring for everyone but math people. Did you know that you can contain the rotational information for a 3D object using only 4 numbers, called a Quaternion? It’s honestly pretty cool stuff.

I am going to try and share more of my art. I don’t think much of myself as an artist. I’m still learning how to draw, really. I’ll share some of my drawings from time to time. Here is one that I made today, just warming up really.

The current project I am working on is called Project Philos. In this game, you are part of an interstellar, generation flotilla of ships, traveling to a new solar system to get a way from everything. It’s a 1,000 year journey, and this game takes place about 250 years in.

In the game, you will be a pilot, driving supplies and people between the ships. Quit a bit of manufacturing would have to be done, so there is a fleet of drones harvesting asteroid out ahead of the flotilla. They send back container of raw material that are then piloted in.

The screen shots I have shown of the game so far represent a training simulator that pilots use to learn the basics of flight.

This picture is one of the big ships, with some smaller ships flying around it. I was just trying to relax and enjoy it, and I think it came out ok, for a really rough one.

I’m hoping to make some progress on physics in the coming weeks. I hope to have more to share soon.

Complications of building an engine… I’ve been working on getting text to rendering in the engine. This is a pretty involved process. Here is where I am at now.

The text along the bottom of the screen is being generated by the rendering engine. Something is very wrong though. All the characters are up-so-down, as the olde saying goes, and I’m not exactly sure why the textures are up-so-down. I have some theories, like the projection matrix being messed up, but I’m not sure.

I also have some issues with the spacing of the characters in the screen. The only thing that seems to be for sure working is the shader, which is rendering color and some textures for characters.

The summer is running out faster than I can believe! I have a goal to get this text rendering portion of the engine to work, and then to get some advance physics done too.

If anyone is curious about this, here is an article about how game engines render text: https://learnopengl.com/In-Practice/Text-Rendering

Enjoy! And wish me luck!

It has been a busy 2 months since the last time I posted. I can’t believe that time when that fast.

I was able to get a lot of work done on the Tower engine. This is the 4th time I have made a game engine, and this is by far the most advanced engine I have created yet.

In the last 2 month, I was able to finish the Database project that I was working on. Currently, the game loads all the object from a database, instead of hard coding all the objects in a level file.

This will give me a lot of advantages, to be sure. Right out the gate its going to speed up my level development, just because I wont have to recompile the whole game to see if an object is in the correct position. I just need to re-load the level now.

I was also able to get the Physics Engine part one integrated with the game. This means that the position of the player’s ship is not being directly changed by input any more. Now, input adjusts the accelerations that are affecting the velocity, which is changing the position of the ship. This makes the ship feel… well… like a ship, and not just like something shaped like a ship in 3D.

I was also able to finish an installer. This will allow everyone to install the required C++ libraries to run the game.

What’s Left?

Before I can do a release, there are still a few things I need to add into the engine, and into the game.

First off, in order for a game to… well… be a game and not just a 3D experience, the game must have a win condition, and a game over condition. Right now, I do detect when the ship has made it all way down the “maze”, but I don’t have a good way to let the player know that they just won!

To fix this problem, I am going to get Text Rendering working. This will let me draw characters to the screen, so I’ll be able to let the Player know when they have won.

I also need more advanced Physics. Physics part two is going to be just this. I am going to add in collision detection and resolution, along with rigid body dynamics. This means that I’ll be able to move the obstacles with physics, put a collision body on them, and detect when the player hits things. I’ll add a life bar, and guns, so the player can destroy things too.

With a point counter, and a nice Win screen, and a nice Game Over screen, I’ll have a demo that I can launch, that will actually be playable.

The Future…

I am going to start posting on my blog more often. I want to document my progress and share updates here. I’m hoping to have a cool screen shot soon, with some rendered text.

This has been a big project that I have been working on for a very long time. I’m getting further than I ever have, and I hope by the end of the year to have a small game ready for a real release. Stay tuned!

Tower Update:

I am still working feverishly on the Tower. I finished a task I called “Entity Serialization” on a weekend game jam recently. Let me explain.

In the Tower (which is the name of the game engine I’m building), an Entity is anything that is rendered to the screen. Back in January, I was able to complete all the code needed to render things, but it’s kind of sloppy and needs to be refactored.

Refactoring is a process engineers go through to refine the solution to a problem. Some solutions to complex problem will work in a pinch, but need to be added to and moved around before they are in a good enough place to move on and forget about. This work is a lot of refactoring existing, working code.

At this point, I have the Simulator map working again. This is a simple rendering demo that shows the ship I’ve made, the Zipper, flying through space.

Each Entity now exists in the code in such a way that I can create them dynamically, using a coding pattern known as a Factory. Maybe I can explain this some time later. It’s also pretty neat.

Next up:

Now that my Entities are in a good place, I am working on a database that I will use to store all the data for the game.

This data will include map information, item stats, character save files, enemy stats, game dialog, and more! I am using sqlite3, a Nosql engine. I chose this because sqlite3 saves each db as a single text file that I can commit with the rest of the game files. This makes the database nothing more than a runtime game asset! This will help me build an editor soon, where I’ll be able to change the position of objects by clicking on them, and then I’ll be able to save the map for next time.

Right now, the way I made the Simulator map was by hand. I position each wall with an equation. I just space them out, and loop over them all. It’s not a great system, but it works.

I want to be able to make more interesting levels without having to painstakingly position each object in code. This was how they did it when they made games on the N64, and it’s one of the reasons the games took as long as they did to make (which is still less than Elder Scrolls VI is taking lol!). Game editors, powered by databases are some of the modern advances I’m allowing in my engine.

I’m starting the database with the configurations needed to run the game. That includes things like the screen resolution, and graphical settings like how many Entities to render. Later this section of the database will also hold things like the input map for the controller and other user preferences.

When this is finished, I’ll be writing an installer, so that all needed c++ libraries can be installed on your computers, and you can try my game out with me. I’ll be publishing the demo on itch.io, a site where indie game developer share projects.

Thinking about Art and me…

I almost named this blog “Not an Artists”. Growing up I labeled myself a “math” kid, and not an artist. I was bad at drawing. I could never capture the forms and figures in a way that I was happy with.

I worked as a Software Engineer at a web hosting company in the 2010’s. I started in tech support, and I had a lot of time to read while at work. I knew that I wanted to work with computers, and I was interested in code.

I built a simple game engine in c#, and then another one in c++. I learned how to use Unity, and participated in a Global Game Jam. It was pretty cool. I was able to make a game with a team of artists helping me.

I started drawing, with a goal to draw daily that I fail at more often than not around this same time. I started to see improvements… I still don’t have the skills that I am looking for, but I’ve realized that the art I am making is not just drawing really well. The code itself is art.

Flash forward. I’m not working as an engineer any more, and AI is quickly closing that door on me. In a world where there is the Unreal engine, which is free, and the Unity engine, which is free, and the Godot engine, which is free, why would I, an out of work software engineer, choose to willingly make a game engine by hand?

I have this poster hanging on my wall. It says that programming is art, basically. And, if you can read that signature… that is John Romero, of Romero Games, formerly of ID software! He is one of the makers of the original Doom games, among many other awesome games. He’s a talented artist and engineer, so he would know about this more than me, I think.

In a world where I could ask an AI bot to generate the code for a game for me, I am choosing to think through it myself. I’ve been working on this project for more than 10 years, learning in my free time, and trying as much as I can when I can. I want to share an idea I have with the world. I’m excited about it. I hope I have what I need to pull it off. I’m closer now than ever before.

This is my long way of trying to explain what I’m doing here! I’m building a game engine from scratch so that I can tell the many stories I’ve been working on since as long as I can remember.

Thanks for reading. I hope to have some really exciting updates soon. Stay posted!