The Fight Space
Fight Space is a game idea I had for the Houghton Game Jam Spring 2007. The event took place on April 7th from 1:00 PM until April 8th at 1:00 PM. During this time there were 8 entries completed and there were several people that helped out.
My Game
Since this event was to take place for only a 24 hour period I needed to keep it as simple as possible but still be creative. I failed on both parts. I decided to take my first shot at a full 3D game in a 24 hour period. So my obvious choice for platforms was XNA for it's extremely fast development time and my familiarity with it.
Tricks
So seeing as this was going to be a 3D game I obviously needed to do some modeling. Thankfully I had been playing with some modeling and XNA supports .fbx files with no problem. Since I was doing a 3D game I decided to keep the game idea very simple so that I could at least finish the game, with any luck. So I decided to create a simple 3D two person fighting game. You use little wizards that can fly and cast spells and such and you kill your opponent. Simple enough.
- Wizards the cast spells and fly
- Model the wizards
Problems
The last time I did any large amount of Matrix mathematics was 5 years ago. These got my head hurting trying to figure my way around rotations and Vector3's to get my camera following the model just right. Eventually though, I got it all straightened out within two hours of time.
Viewports was another issue I ran into. I had never had to do multiple screens in one before. However, it turned out to be very, very easy with XNA.
The last bit of problems I had were miniscule. Trying to do my best at modeling a wizard, losing internet in the middle of the game jam, and simple coding structure.
- Matrix Multiplacation
- Viewport tricks
- Wizard Modeling
- Code Structure
- Lost internet
What went right
Everything came together in the end surprisingly well. I was able to make my wizards cast spells wich glowed and flew really fast, or really slow at the enemies. I managed to create a skybox in which the stars would slowly fly by the character. The models didn't turn out too bad for my lack of experience in modeling.
Conclusion & Links
The whole event turned out fantastic. Norm Nazaroff brought the whole thing to us and did a wonderful job. Norm is graduating from tech this year so he will not be in charge of the game jam next year. However, it looks like I will probably be taking it over. So if anyone is interested in joining next year and you're in the Houghton area, let me know and I'll start getting a list ready.
I had problems with my old installer because the audio file didn't push over when I published it. So here is the new install link and source code.
Install : http://www.visionsofafar.com/HoughtonGameJamFightSpace.zip
Source Code : http://www.visionsofafar.com/HGJ/HoughtonGameJamFightSpaceSource.zip
Video : http://www.visionsofafar.com/FightSpace.wmv
Youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxIyfzb9Bvo
Game Requirements