100 Experience Points
An Adventure in Indie Game Development

Day 16: 18 February 2013

20:48: Let me start off the day by saying I spent part of my time updating the navigation on my tutorial website, specifically in the C# tutorials.

I’d love feedback on that, if you have time to check it out. I’d rather fix any problems with it before taking the time to roll it out to all of my other tutorials there.

Now. On to the game development!

23:01: While it has a ton of work to do still, the shipyard is now coming together. Below is a screenshot of the first ship ever built in the shipyard!

First Ship Design

Yes, I added like 30 guns to my ship. This gives you an idea of what you might be able to do in the shipyard. You construct the hull, probably from hull pieces/building blocks. Then, you can attach the pieces you want to the outside of the hull, however you want. I’m planning on making it so that you can mirror things (adding to one side adds to the opposite side automatically), and that things that are mounted on the spine (within some tolerance of the center) will snap to the center line automatically. Things like that will make it easier to build nicer looking ships.

And in theory, the ship in the image above is actually a ship you’d be able to create. There’s not necessarily a limit to the number of guns that you place on a ship. Just that the more guns you have, the more it costs to build one, and the slower it is, because of the additional mass of the guns.

And there will be much more than just guns that you can attach to a ship. You’d be able to attach sensors, bays (as in hangar bays or cargo bays) communications arrays, shield generators, engines (don’t forget those), and a variety of other utility objects.

Of course, as I dive into this, I’m beginning to see all of the pieces that I’m going to need to write code for. As I said, there’s still a ton of work left to do, but I’m maintaining at least a little hope that this could actually come together into something worthwhile by time the 100 days is up. Cross your fingers!

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2 Comments

Windwalker

19 February 2013 at 07:42 am

3d is amazing stuff… Which I know now I can’t get into with my current knowledge level. As always you are amazing RB, keep up the good work and keep the flame burning!

RB Whitaker

19 February 2013 at 04:43 pm

@Windwalker, 3D is really not so bad. XNA hides a lot of the underlying 3D junk from you with the Model/ModelMesh/ModelMeshPart classes. But if you pull back that layer and make your own vertex and index buffers (I have tutorials for those) then you learn how it’s “really” done. The Model class just wraps this up in a nice little package.

One thing’s for sure, you can’t make games very easily if you don’t know geometry and some linear algebra. Game math/physics is something I really really really want to make a book about some day, but right now, I’m making a game. So it will have to wait.

In other news… geez… the font on this site is kind of big. And comments seem to be hidden a bit further away than I’d like. I should fix those sometime.