Monday, March 13, 2017

The Getaway

Hello again. This week I made a game about running from the cops. The Getaway is a game where you've just robbed a bank and now you have to get as far as possible before you get run off the road and arrested.

Controls are simple, cursor keys to steer/accelerate/brake, left control or spacebar to shoot. M toggles music.

This weeks game was a little ambitious and I was hard pressed to complete all the features I wanted. I wanted there to be at least 2 enemies as well as civilians, but only 1 enemy made it in the game, and as it stands there are no civilians.

Infinite scrolling worlds are tons of fun to make and the effect is very nice, but I wasted a day and a half writing a procedural generator for the road system which included turns and varying road widths that I eventually just removed from the game due to the added complexity and how I wasn't happy with the results.

Collisions proved difficult as I didn't want to rely on dyn4j's built in collision handling, instead I opted for my own which matched the style I wanted to go with more closely. This was a major time sink though and probably accounted for a third of the work, but the game does play how I envisioned it so I don't consider it time wasted. On top of everything I decided to try multi-threading with the collisions. This lead to a solid day of de-bugging and odd behavior that took awhile to sort out. The magic of ecs made this a lot less painful though and I'm glad I tried it.

The other big time sink was assets. I like 3d models and I can whip out the mesh in maybe 2 hours for one of these cars, but textures eat alot of time for even very basic paint jobs. Particle effects are also very time consuming. I had no stock images to work with so I wound up having to run some simulations to get the effects I have now. Most of this should be easily re-usable for future projects though, which is a plus.

Ultimately this week proved tough for me as I had very high hopes for this project but in the end I had to remove large segments of what I was working on just so I could finish something by Monday. I'm pleased with the amount of work that went into this one though, and behind the scenes this project is easily twice as complex as any I've done yet.

Tools used: jMonkeyEngine, Zay-ES, Lemur, Dyn4j, Blender, Krita.
Download URL
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0Bz4nByoX2Ks7MGNHMVdGYkVRM3c?usp=sharing

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