Although my spare time is pretty limited these times, and motivating myself to code after work (where I code almost all day code) isn’t very easy progress on “Trugbild” is coming along very nice. I guess one of the best ideas was to limit the technical aspects of the game to some very basic OpenGL and gameplay stuff.
This allows me to concentrate on the game itself, without having to think alot about complex programming problems. As I mentioned in my initial post, my coding style is very modular, so most of the stuff I need for this project (textures, shaders, sound, etc.) was already there in my different manager classes (that are used for e.g. Projekt “W”) that I just had to include. This allowed for a very fast prototyping, and with roughly 2,000 lines of code I already have a playable prototype up and running.
And recently I got the perfect idea for the game’s setting. As usual, that idea struck me while doing something completly unrelated to coding and not being near a computer. And since most of my ideas materalize when away from the computer, I’d advise anyone with creativite troubles to stay away from any electronic device and do something completly boring (like the dishes) ;)
I already mentioned that the game will play in the mind of a character that you have to guide through a series of questions pertaining to life itself. These series (divided into stages) will be embbeded into the mind of a dying person. The “game” will start off with the player resting in a sickbed, having problems to keep it’s eyes open while doctors and relatives around are talking about you. Soon you’ll drift away and the game itself will start. During your journey you’ll then wake up from time to time, seeing different people talking by your bedside.
Implementing the scene roughly took three days, starting off with a drawing I made to get an idea on how the scene could look, over to a mockup in Photoshop to the final implementation into the game. The scene itself is made up of different 2D objects and is not just static. People that talk are highlighted and shifted towards your viewpoint and I’ve also applied some kind of (old-school) parallax scrolling effect, so you can look around with your cursor and the 2D objects move by different deltas.
And since that looks much better in motion I’ll try to get up a video of the current prototype as soon as possible.