I took a holiday a few weeks ago and before that spent a week making Tetris in C++. Okay, that was an excuse. This post is a bit late, but I kept putting it off until I had something worthwhile to show. Before I got into what I actually got done since last blog I want to just write a bit about my experience making Tetris.
Tetris 2
The image above is what I made, from scratch, in C++, in about 6 days. It's always fun for me to work in a language with strict type rules after working at my day to day in the anarchy of PHP and JavaScript. Working in a compiled language is tough in some ways, but I find it really neat having the peace of mind knowing that what compiles is "correct". Once I finally managed to iron out all the nasty bugs and compile errors I wrote I found the game worked wonderfully. I didn't have to worry as much as I usually have to about bizarre runtime behaviour and the likes.
Programming Tetris was overall a fairly easy activity for me. I've had enough experience by now writing basic 2D games like this from scratch that I knew exactly what I would need and how to write it. A render loop here, and a gameplay loop there... some abstract classes and a pinch of graphics manipulation and voila! That's not to say there weren't any challenges... I attempted to write a generic rotation function that would be capable of rotating any shape by 90 degrees but failed and resorted to hardcoding the rotations - this was possible because there was only a handful of shapes. I also dealt with many bugs that I wrote in my misunderstanding of C++ styles or just plain carelessness. The last bug I solved was a fun one:
Once the gameover screen was displayed you could press enter to restart the game. That worked fine, but the GAME OVER text didn't vanish. I checked the code to make it disappear, and it all seemed right. When the game detected game over it showed the text and stored the pointer to it, and when the player triggered restart that pointer was cleared from the render list. It all checked out. So, what was going on? The big clue was when I watched the resource allocation graph Visual Studio helpfully gives in debug mode. It was happily chugging up and down most of the game until the game over screen appeared... at which point it started climbing like a mountain goat, straight up. The cause? The code to check when to add the game over screen was in the main game loop, so each game tick it was triggered over and over, adding a new gameover screen to the render list every time. When restart occurred the game dutifully removed the pointer it had to the game over screen - but this was just the last pointer it had, there were still a few hundred thousand gameover screens displayed underneath it. Whoops!
Anyway, I won't talk any more about the Tetris project. I wanted to mention it to show I haven't been doing nothing. You can see the git repo for it here if you want to see the code: https://gitlab.com/SquidEmpire/tetris2
So now, what have I done for this game?
Mostly... spritework. There's so much to be done and as always I suffer from thinking "what if"? What if my sprites are not good enough? What if I used a stronger pallet and reduced the colours? What if I redid the grass tiles? What if I use a shader for water, or what if I hand drew all the water myself? It's easy to become paralysed by thinking what you've done isn't good enough, I know. The only solution is just to power on and answer "I can fix it later" to all the what ifs. Of course, that's the actual decision. Just making the call and telling yourself I can fix it later IS the actual decision. Rarely do I ever fix things later, but the option is always there. Better to make some decision at all than to languish in "what ifs".
And so, I have been doing building sprites for my Arcadians.
Briar Homestead
Unlike the communal utilitarian Union, the individualistic Arcadians live in houses that are as personalised as they are individual. To this end I am drawing all their houses completely custom, pixel by pixel, as opposed to the Union's tilesheet based architecture. This means a lot of time spend pushing pixels around, but I think it is important to visually set the two factions apart.
The Briar Homestead (above) is designed to be a mix between a traditional English farmhouse and an ecological "green" structure. I have a thick layer on turf on the roof and used a green tint for rocks that make up the walls. The house will be on top of a hill on some rolling plains, with old drystone walls rising and sinking from the thick grass.
Here's the description of the homestead from my designs:
Briar Homestead
The biggest and westernmost homestead in the area, Briar homestead is a large turf covered rough stone complex, located atop a gently sloping grass hill and surrounded by plains dotted with small ponds and clumps of trees. The area’s terrain bears the outline of the remains of an 18th century manor house: Greenehall Prirory, itself built on the ruins of an older monastery, which was built on an old Norman castle which in turn was built on a roman fort. The areas adjacent to the hill are now covered over by fields, where the Briar family grows wheat, potatoes, and vegetables. The homestead proper consists of a main hall, four bedrooms, a small library, kitchen, storehouse, mill, an apiary, and a - now disused - barn. There is a barrow to the south of the homestead, where preceding generations of the family are buried.
Teljä Homestead
Here is the Teljä Homestead. It is based on a kesämökki. There will also be a boathouse and sauna building in the same complex, made in the same style. For this building I took a red colour scheme and drew all the shingles on the roof by hand over about an hour, hurting my wrist in the process. As with a lot of my work about 1/2 of the way through I was extremely pleased with the result, thinking it might be my best ever, and then by the time I get to the end I am less enthusiastic. The singles on the small extension on the front are haphazard and poorly defined. The roof's angle appears wrong. The house doesn't look right. It will be a lot of work to redo this one later if I have to, so for now it will do, but I am keeping it in the back of my mind.
This homestead is described as so:
Teljä Homestead
In the far north of the Arcadian lands on the shoreline is the homestead of the Lahtinen family. The homestead is strongly built from timber near the shore, where the Lahitnen’s focus is on fishing. There are three main buildings, the homestead proper, the boat shed, and the sauna house.There is very little cleared land around the homestead, and only a small herb and vegetable garden.
I haven't started on the final homestead, the Temple Homestead. That one is to be a simple small log cabin.
There's a lot to do and my plan to get a demo out by the end of the year demands I work hard, but I still think it's doable!
Thanks for having a read ;)
