Preliminary Design
In Fall 2008 I worked on my first small, PC-based game using DirectX 9. The original concept for the game was to be a small dungeon-crawling based game where you played through the dungeons as an archer. Each room of the dungeon would be equipped with turrets, a maze, and enemies. Rooms with a maze only required the player to get to the exit of the room while empty rooms required the player to eliminate all enemies in the room before progressing to the next room. Plans for a boss at the end of the dungeon were discussed, but never realized due to time constraints on the project. In fact, the game in its final form is nothing as we had planned in the beginning.

(Click thumbnails to enlarge – Original concept sketches)

So what was the deal with not meeting our original goals? The biggest reason we were unable to realize our original design was due to the fact that this was a game programming class. We walked in on day one not knowing anything about either Visual Studio or DirectX programming. This fact alone cut our work time in half as the first half of the semester was devoted to learning how to use DirectX to make something that resembled a game. The class served as a reality check at how time consuming building a game is. Implement a new enemy, test the game. Oops! The game crashed, let’s track down why. Maybe that or the new piece of code doesn’t work as you thought it would have, its time to rewrite it or pinpoint your logic error. Needless to say, with only two programmers and one artist, you’re stretched thin relatively easily.

Finished Product
Below are some screenshots of the “final” version of LINUS (the version that was turned in at the end of the semester). The game’s main character became a robot since the artist completed the robot sprite and it was what we had to work with first and the game’s basic mechanics were altered within the final weeks of developing the game since it was apparent that there was not enough time to accomplish everything we wanted to in the beginning.

With these things in mind, LINUS evolved into a game that is best described as a fusion or Geometry Wars and Smash TV set in a desert where you control a robot that blasts through extraterrestrial enemies. The game is not about completing the game, since that is impossible. Instead its about how many points you can manage to rack up before you become overrun by the enemies and run out of lives.

(Click thumbnails to enlarge – Final game screenshots)

Even with the revised game premise and mechanics we still didn’t get everything into the game we had hoped for. Code was assembled on the last week to include two types of enemies equipped with projectiles, but we ran into issues where either the enemy firing caused the game to crash or the enemies projectiles wouldn’t register as hits on the LINUS robot. Since we couldn’t pinpoint the issues with the code quick enough, and we didn’t want to demo a game that crashed as soon as things started to get interesting, we took the two new enemy types out of the game.

A working demo might be posted here in the future. Right now I’m waiting to get final polished artwork for some bits of the game and don’t want to post the game in its current state. Hopefully I’ll get my hands on those assets soon and post a working copy of the game here.

Overall it was a fun semester project and I wouldn’t mind working on another game in the future. I’ve downloaded the XNA since then to play with development on the XBOX 360, but I’ll save my comments on that for a future post.