Friday, February 1, 2008

The Technology

I've received several inquiries as to what sort of technology I'm using to create my roguelike. I've been busy lately (apparently coding games all day makes you less motivated to code your own game at night), so I figured I'd make a small post about it. I'm mostly kicking around design ideas in my head so a more game related post should soon follow.

The language I'm using is C++, and I use Visual Studio as my IDE. More specifically I'm using the Express Edition which is as fully featured as I need. There are many reasons I've chosen C++ and Visual Studio. The first is that it's what I use at my day job to create games, so I'm comfortable with the language and the environment. It also happens to work with the SDK that I'm building my game off of.

The SDK I'm using is the Playground SDK. This is also the technology I use during the day to make commercial games, so I'm extremely comfortable with it. Playground takes care of all of the heavy lifting, which allows me to focus on the actual game. There are many advantages to using Playground.
  • Free to use
  • Great support (developer forums)
  • Multi-Platform (PC and Mac)
  • Localization
  • Lua Scripting


You can find more information at the website above. I know I might seem like a shill, but I encourage you to check out the SDK. It's allowed me to hit the ground running, especially since I'm comfortable within its framework. I can focus on writing the actual game instead of worrying about other things unrelated but still necessary. The support for Lua is also a big plus, but I'm not as comfortable using it as I hope to be. Hopefully I can integrate some more support for it within my game.

I also have the advantage of learning the technology while on the job, and applying it to what I do in my free time. This is especially useful as I learn different design patterns for different types of objects and then can apply them to Mirage. I can also add some neat tricks to the game that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise (think ascii particle effects)!

2 comments:

Worthstream said...

"ascii particle effects"?
If you're not kidding i'd love to see it in action :)

That could be the topic of an interesting post! Maybe with a little primer on particle systems, where do you plan to use them in Mirage and a little gif-like tech demo...

keep up the good posting! :)

rsalsman said...

I'm not kidding, but it's not a feature that is high on my list. It's something I could add at any time that would be completely separate from any game related code.

When and if I do implement them I'll be sure to talk about them.

Thanks for the encouragement, I'll have to pretty significant feature related posts up by the end of the week.