Diary of a Game: Day 3

Starting to get into a rhythm. Worked on the starter kit throughout the day. Might not seem like a huge amount of progress, but, importantly, I am taking my time to get the foundations rock solid before I start experimenting with gameplay.

Today I achieved the following:

• Allow each scene of the game (each of which is a Flecs entity), to have a custom background colour and shader, which will automatically be used when rendering the scene.
• Improved how scenes spawn themselves, to make this logic more self-contained. Tidied up some leaky abstractions here.
• Cleaned up the callback code for the Nuklear GUI entities. More tidying up.
• Big refactor of display logic, moving the responsibility of rendering the display completely into Flecs, reducing the game loop to two lines of code. This will make it easier to experiment with different camera systems (such as split-screen multiplayer) in the future.
• Added fade transitions between scenes, and fixed a few bugs here and there.

All of this has been pushed up to v0.3.0 of the StarterKit, so take a look!

My plans for the weekend are to get a spaceship rendering on the game screen, and to control it with the Chipmunk2D physic engine. I also want to implement a proper pause mose (which BLaTTiX never had), and debug rendering of physics objects, which will be essential when fleshing out Gravitas. Finally, I want to make Nuklear responsive to keyboard and controller input, as it is currently mouse only.

And, time permitting, I’ll fire up an Amiga emulator and play a few rounds of Gravity Force with my son :)