And with much hesitation, I've finally begun on the actually groundwork that the game will run on.
But just what is this fabled project, you might be asking yourself? Although the name has already been chosen, I'm going to throw a crude Work-In-Progress name until a more dramatic moment of unveiling: Project 4BP! More specifically: Project 4-Bit Platformer!
This game will be a tribute of sorts to all of those wonderful elderly PC DOS games that ran in 320x240 resolution and made use the massive 16-colour palette. Such legendary games as Commander Keen, Halloween Harry, Crystal Caves, and others. (Sans my bias towards Apogee :P)
Today was spent getting going on the actual code itself. I've decided to use C# for this project -- as I've already mentioned -- alongisde the raw 2D pixel-pushing power of the .NET flavour of SDL, SDL.NET. So far it's proving WAY more effective than GDI+, giving me FPS times of ~150 while rendering a full tile-map. If I were using GDI+ via WinForms, I'd be lucky to get over 10. :( Huzzah for native DirectDraw acceleration!
As I was saying before that little tangent arose, today was spent on getting the groundwork going for the game engine. Since it'll be a nice juicy platformer, the integral parts are: a) a solid tile engine for the map itself, and b) a sprite manager to keep everything in check. There's also a relatively simple game state mechanism that keeps track of just where we are in the game. So far the TileEngine class takes care of holding map data, camera offset, and rendering the actual map. It's currently just full of random tiles that Draffurd (the game's [wonderful] artist) has drawn so far. Nothing fancy, but it shows that it works:
("All real purty-like!")
As you can see it's just the Random class pumping out values to fill what would otherwise be an empty tilemap. Later on I'll focus on writing somesort of simplistic map editor to accomodate the content creation process.
Next up -- which I'm working on as we speak -- is the SpriteManager class. This will take care of rendering virtually everything that will be considered an "entity": enemies, spikes, the player, tomatoes, and all of that wonderful stuff. Likely I'll hack in text rendering as well for the heck of unification. :P
VC# 2005 Express Pro: That neat "highlight your latest mistake" feature along the bottom is really neat. Helps me catch the rare typos that I make. :)
VC# 2005 Express Con: For some reason, every time I use the "Add New Item.." "Class" it adds references to System, System.Data, and System.XML every time, even after I remove them previously. Blah.
In other words, progress is moving along steadily. Me and Draffurd are both very confident in the product that we'll be pushing into the finish line, come the end of this month. :)