Building an example game

Over the past week, I implemented several things for Kludgine:

  • Added buttons - which meant adding mouse state tracking and proper styling support
  • Added text alignment, which exposed some shortcomings in my text wrapping approach (wasn’t keeping enough information about whitespace through the process)
  • Refactored/rewrote the text wrapping algorithm, it’s much cleaner now and made it easy to fix the whitespace issues mentioned above.

As I wrote last week’s update, I was feeling the desire to put something more substantial together than my barebones examples. I think the examples folder deserves simple, straightforward examples showing off various areas of functionality. However, other people have taken the approach of developing a tutorial series around writing a game in their engine.

I decided I wanted to try to find a jam to inspire me to create something small with my engine. Last time I attempted a game jam, I didn’t have a few fundamental pieces, and I was overly optimistic at my ability to develop them during a game jam. This time, I knew I had Buttons! As funny as that sounds, those basic concepts hampered my ability to develop anything of substance, because everything I wanted to do was so much work. My engine just wasn’t ready.

However, now I have all the basic concepts that will allow me to create a basic Main Menu with most of the code being declarative-style code.

I was browsing for a game jam on Saturday morning, and I came across NEOC#03 Rhythm Game Jam, and while I haven’t talked about it here, many close friends know that I’ve been craving making some music or rhythm game for a while. The game jam has a generous 2-week timeline.

I’ve started a design doc of sorts here on Google Docs, and the repository can be followed on github. I’m going to be trying to stream almost every day working on this project, and at the end of the jam, I am hoping that I will have something worth cleaning up, documenting, and reviewing in a YouTube video.

I’m going to focus most of the writing for this project over on the itch.io page. I may skip next week’s update on the forums here, depending on how much progress I’ve made generically on Kludgine vs. the jam itself. Regardless, after the jam, I’ll post an update for sure talking about the experience and where I view my next steps on this long journey.

Have a wonderful week, everyone!