The programmiest of programmer art
Blaster One (2002?)
This was pretty much the first "full" game I ever made, which, according to some of the filename dates, was finished in about February 2005, and started around...2002? I don't recall how much time I directly spent working on it, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't 3 years straight of coding. I was distracted by a lot of other random things at that time in my life. But you can call it my own personal Duke Nukem Forever, if you want! Though technically, the very first game I made was a pong clone, but let's not talk too much about that. Shooting poorly rendered UFOs is much more appealing, after all. I will admit that the first time I learned you could just add a negative sign to the velocity to simulate bouncing the puck backwards was kind of mind blowing at the time. But back to Blaster One...
From what I remember, I pretty much used Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus (which I still own!) to learn some basic 2D Game Programming with DirectX 7 at the time. Lots of stuff about blitting sprites, creating DirectDraw surfaces, fooling with Win32, drawing rects, dealing with backbuffers, and so on. I think this was also before DirectX 8 switched to using polygons as sprites, so now I feel really old, because I think that's what all the kids these days are doing.
For Blaster One, I didn't exactly have a formal game design document or anything, but I just knew I wanted to make a space shooter, because hey, that seemed relatively easy. I started thinking of things in terms of "objects" (remember, I'm doing a computer science major at the time), and was able to create classes based on these. The game basically consists of:
I also added some flickering pixels in the background to represent the fact that you were quickly moving through a starfield. And the music that plays in it (and Maverick?) Also made it myself using Finale. I took an Introduction to Music Theory class in 2000 or so, so I put that to good use here, I suppose.
It was also probably the first usage of "Soul Creations", which if you look up, is the title of the very website that you're on! The very first steps of the multimedia mogul I would become. Haha.
From what I remember, I pretty much used Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus (which I still own!) to learn some basic 2D Game Programming with DirectX 7 at the time. Lots of stuff about blitting sprites, creating DirectDraw surfaces, fooling with Win32, drawing rects, dealing with backbuffers, and so on. I think this was also before DirectX 8 switched to using polygons as sprites, so now I feel really old, because I think that's what all the kids these days are doing.
For Blaster One, I didn't exactly have a formal game design document or anything, but I just knew I wanted to make a space shooter, because hey, that seemed relatively easy. I started thinking of things in terms of "objects" (remember, I'm doing a computer science major at the time), and was able to create classes based on these. The game basically consists of:
- A ship (controlled by player's mouse)
- A bullet (created with a velocity whenever the player clicks a mouse button)
- Napalm (effectively the "shotgun" of the game, created the same way as the bullet, but with a wider spread, and slower rate of fire)
- A UFO (the enemies that are spawned from the top of the screen and move downward)
- Power-ups (random items that also spawn from the top of the screen, and modify your weapon, or instantly kills any active enemies)
I also added some flickering pixels in the background to represent the fact that you were quickly moving through a starfield. And the music that plays in it (and Maverick?) Also made it myself using Finale. I took an Introduction to Music Theory class in 2000 or so, so I put that to good use here, I suppose.
It was also probably the first usage of "Soul Creations", which if you look up, is the title of the very website that you're on! The very first steps of the multimedia mogul I would become. Haha.
Art
This is also very much programmer art. The ship, the UFO, and the napalm:
Download
Note: I don't provide any support for this, (it doesn't even work on my primary Windows 8 machine, but it did work on my Windows 7 machine) but the .zip file does contain all the source code if you want to check out my code from 2002-2005.
| blaster_one.zip |