Scenery Leaping

I’ve come up with a cool way to help keep the game light and fast while appearing full.

Each level in my game will be made of a bunch of streets in Toronto, but I don’t have the time to go and model every building, so the game will show a generated approximation of Toronto.  For a residential street, there will easily be over a hundred houses.  Since I will have about 10 different house models, I have to spread them along the street repetitively.

As the character walks forward, the same houses will leap from behind them to in front of them, giving the player a view of a fully designed street, while it’s actually all being built just out of view.  This way, I’ll only have to have a few houses in memory at one time.

I call it leaping.  Although I’m sure something like this has been thought of and done before, I’m still pretty proud I’ve done it myself.  Don't get me wrong, it's simple, but it's very useful.

The same tactic will be used for fire hydrants, street lights, stop signs, etc.  The code doesn’t change between these types of scenery objects, so fleshing out Toronto will be a breeze!

Game design document

For those who don't know, a game design document is made to bring all of the creative ideas one has about a game into concrete form. It means making a lot of decisions early on so that you have direction later on, leaving you to focus on development. When working with a team, like I am, it helps make sure everyone has the same concept. The game might not follow every line spot-on, but it should end up being rather close. Here's a screenshot of my completed GDD for Quarantine: T.O. from a bird's eye view.


If you're interested, you can see the whole thing here. I'll be pulling parts from the document and posting about them as I work on those parts to keep you all in the know of how it's coming.

~ John Adam

A fresh start

This blog will be a place for me to publicly record my progress of my capstone project for my game programming course at Humber College.  It will be a zombie apocalypse survival shoot-em-up type game, and hopefully will be pretty complex.  You can read the project pitch here.

I hope to inspire a few programmers wanting to create their own games with this blog.  It's going to be a wild ride!

~ John Adam