Game Design Novice

They are few and far between, but here is another game i have started working on.

Space Bomber

It is (will be) a space shooting MMO with planets and gravity, shields and whatnot. Screenshots will come as we progress. The code is opensource and can be downloaded from googlecode for anyone who wants to build it (nothing much yet). It requires SFML.

The brighter ones will notice who made the graphics which can be found in the souce->browse->trunk->client->media :)

oh! oh! may I help out? :) (particularly with graphics and such)

:)

Sooooooo, when can I get a win 32 build of this? :)

— hartnell

What program did you use? Just curious…

Hey everyone, and welcome to my blog ;)

I'm very happy you guys are showing an interest in this game. I'm wondering, is it the MMO part of the title? It might have been overstated a bit… With our current design i don't think we will be able to have a massive amount of players. But i'm hoping 20 won't be a problem… we'll see, or, i hope we will see.

@mr glasses, [Removed] yeah… ehm… i mean, yes sir! Neither me nor my "partner in crime" have any graphics skills whatsoever¹. What we need is planets, and space "things", i don't know what everything in space is called, supernovas and such, background (stars and such), parallax layered would be nice like i did with my Space shooter RPG like demo (which didn't get further. Some space ships, although i have some fine specimens from hartnell and the gang (kakefisk). They will probably (hopefully) need some add-ons later on, and coloring. I am thinking each player can color an overlay, which will be applied to the ships to give each player his unique color. Not sure how to do that just yet, some kind of blending and alpha channels and such. Who knows what else will be useful, HUD, pickups, missiles and bullets, homing mines?, space station etc etc. The game is pretty open still.

@hartnell, good to see you around :) What happened to your photo? Did you remove it because you were afraid it was scaring people off? Hehe ;) Anyways, my first build was just a spaceship underneath the mouse pointer. Then we created two separate projects, one for the server and one for the clients. The plan is to build in phases. In the first phase the server will send the complete gameworld (unreliably using UDP) to all clients and the clients will send their keyboard state to the server (also unreliably). The game will execute on the server so if a client should not receive the gameworld once, he'll get it next frame.

So, nothing really to see yet. But as soon as i have a spaceship flying around, i'll create a build and post it on googlecode.

Do you think we can set up a wiki here? Is it possible to create a wiki with my own domain? I have bought spacebomber.net and i am thinking there is no better wiki software (at least syntax wise) then this!

My personal goal with this project is to learn SFML to the bone (i haven't forgotten about our SFML project hartnell :)) as well as multiplayer games and the problems related to these. I am also in the process of writing a zombie shooter game using SFML which i am writing a tutorial series about. Hopefully all this will lead to somewhere.

@cog, we are using C++ with SFML.

My blog update for the evening.

I implemented part of "phase one" of our communications protocol, which now allows clients to connect to the server and when they do the server creates a space ship for them and it becomes part of the game world. I also implemented the client to show all game objects sent from the server.

In short, i implemented connecting to the server and showing the game world… next step, send movement commands from clients to control spaceships… also, it might be time for some updates of the game world so the ships actually move :)

Here's a screenie

@graphics. ;) I can do pretty much anything you'd like. Space ships, missles, mines, space stations, frigates, planets, HUD elements, missles, mines, explosions lasers….the whole bit. (maybe even soem cool looking 3D stuff that is generally unusefull :) I can work of some parrylax layers and nebuli also.) Anything you need I can try…though I won't guaruntee success. :) What sort of art style are you guys going for?

I'd offer to help with programming, but you have me way beat there. I'd be more of a hinderance than a help since I knew very little about c++ (but I'm dying to learn and I don't spend enough time trying to learn)

I also can help with sounds and can dredge up a nice collection of creative commons music.

Anything you need I can try out. :)

Perhaps the response is due to the fact that your making a project and we'd love to see our expert c++er in action and be a part of it?

Here is a planet that I cooked up for this project. suggestions for future makes? (I can also send you a version with the alpha channle if oyu would like)

This looks really good. It gives me an idea. Can i get the red atmosphere effect as a separate image. That way i can slowly rotate the planet while the atmosphere (source of light) stays the same… i think it will look awesome!

Maybe i need the atmosphere as red on transparent, so to speak, so that it is see-through. We should really do some experiments. I want to do something similar with the ships so the players can have different colors.

Blog update. I have now converted the commands sent from clients into spaceship movements. Planet rotates and you can now fly around with the spaceship when you connect. You will also see the other players flying around.

Here is a demo where i connect two clients and fly with both of them

http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stV0JXS0FIR1xYQVxaX1pbUF5d/space_bomber_first_movements

I added some (crappy) gravity, collision detection and response to the planets. There is also a build (finally) so if you feel like trying it out, have a go and download it from:

http://code.google.com/p/spacebomber/downloads/list

There is a separate download which contains all the SFML dll files which either have to be installed, or put in the same directory as the executable.

Let me know how it goes :)

I just tested it out then. I had the same problem as Mr Glasses, the text that was appearing for me was "Address 255.255.255.255 is not valid". I then figured it might have been an address issue, so I tried "client.exe localhost" and that worked for me.

It's pretty cool, though that gravity seems a bit strong. :P Once I got too close to a planet I'd just get stuck. :P

So what do you think you might be working on next and stuff?

Thanks. Glad to get some feedback. Right now there isn't much happening. We have recently added some bullets, but they don't really do anything (except kill the network when too many are fired). So my first priority is fix that, then

• add camera view, so the world becomes bigger
• Then maybe collision between players so they bump instead of flying through
• And then bullet damage and killing each other.

Something like that.