ZombieRage – current state
I made a short video of the current state the project I'm working on.
As you can see, it is not much, but its something 
The menu is working - even with settings, where you can change the window size. There is also an intro, but I was a little bit lazy to put this into the video also (it is just text - so you haven't missed anything). The zombies are walking in my direction, and as you can see, I used the sprites mentioned in my previous post.
The next part (which I tried to avoid in the video) is integrating a neat path finding algorithm. The first thing I stumbled upon was the "A*" algorithm. At the moment I'm not sure how I can get this into my code without having the frames per second dropping below 25 ... but as always - there is a solution out there
I found my zombies
The game on which I'm currently working involves zombies. In my last game, the zombies were only represented by boring circles. So I'm eager to change this - but my graphical skills are limited to a few things I learned decades ago.
Luckily there are many sources on the net, were you can get stuff for your projects. I've found a spritesheet for my zombies on OpenGameArt.org. I will use those for my current project - *braaaaains*
If you are searching for free stuff like those, you will find many different pages. There are a few good, but most of them are outdated and nearly dead. Have a look at a few sites I've been looking at:
- OpenGameArt.org
- CgTextures
- Lost Garden (very nice blog, includes some free art)
- OpenFontLibrary
- Pixel Prospector (a blog all about indie gaming - they have huge lists about everything)
The first zombies
Did I mention, that I love zombies?! So the first game I wrote was a "kill zombies or be killed" game. Could it be, that 83 percent of all first games have zombies within? It had no textures (not counting the blood splatters I used in the menu) and no sound. The "ground" was light grey, the zombies dark grey, the player white and the bullets were yellow.
Drawing some circles onto the screen - yeah, what a challenge ... It got interesting when it came down to calculations on how the zombies should move. Probably any middle school kid would had laughed at me. But having to remember Pythagoras and his guys was serious business. But I managed to get along and get the zombies moving
My next challenge was collision detection. Without detection collisions the zombies wouldn't be able to catch me, neither would i be able to shoot them. In addition, the zombies would stack over each other. So whenever a zombie or any other entity changes its position, you need to check against every other existing entity if their outlines are overlaping. This easy aproach has also its disadvantages - the more entities you have, the slower it gets. There are ways to get around that - but more on that an other time.
To sum it up for you:
- Kill zombies
- Every round they are getting faster
- Did I mention bullet time?
Executable package for Windows: Download
Source code: Download
(Me) Getting started
Making games was always a dream for me. A desire for which I was to lazy to make it real. First thought - Me making the next generation FPS - or even better - I'm making an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. After some thinking and reading, more thinking and more reading I realized that I have to establish knowledge and experience.
But how do I got started?
Location, loca ... erm ... Information, Information, Information. I kept googling many nights on different topics, made my way through different indie blogs, got distracted for hours at 9gag . I read about Game patterns, searched for inspiration on deviantart and googled for free art - and by free I mean like "Creative Common"-free (there's plenty of good stuff out there). But mostly I was searching for an engine with which I could try out some things. And there are also an ass full of game engines/frameworks out there. Some for money, some for free.
Of course - if I'm making a game it has to be three dimensional! So the first engine with which I played around was "Ogre3D". That meant I had to refresh my C++ skills. After playing around for a few days I had to admit that neither my coding skills, my ass kicking 3d modeling skills or the understanding of what I'm getting into was at an satisfying level. So I dropped the whole idea of making a 3D game, and stopped thinking about it.
Many months later I found myself again browsing some engines and I decided to give a two dimensional engine a shot. The engine which got my attention was "Löve2d". Taken from the website - "This is an *awesome* framework you can use to make 2D games in Lua. It's free, open-source, and works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux". I played around with it and with the language - a lot of fun I even ordered two books for Lua, which I was reading before going to bed ^^
Since I love zombies, I decided to do something in that direction.
I will post the game with my next post - don't expect too much