I really didn't hit the ground running when it came to this whole blogging thing. Although this is a problem that I have with a lot of things: I say that I am going to do something, I get started on it, and then I don't do it. I'm sure that I am not the only person to have this problem but that does not make it any less annoying.
But I did finish one thing I set out to do, finish a game. You can check out Dark Room on my github page: https://github.com/Barret5Ocal/DarkRoom-. It honestly isn't much. It is just a game where the player explores an invisible unending maze. Most people would wonder why the game was even made. Well, here's your explanation.
About a month or maybe a month and a half ago, I was feeling pretty down on myself. I was feeling like my life wasn't really going anywhere and that I was trapped by my social awkardness. I felt the need to just finish something no matter how small it was, so I came up with Dark Room. Dark Room was designed to be a small game that I could finish up in about a month. I think it took me a little longer, but that's alright since I learned a lot.
The main educational goal of Dark Room was to get a foot in the door on OpenGL. I had never made anything with OpenGL before, so I need something small that even I could do so that I could get more familar with the library. I also needed to actually make something that was a finished product, even if it is barely a finished product. Dark Room was the first step to being a better engine programmer, now the big question is: "what next?".
The next game that I'm going to do is a 2v2 FPS bullet hell type thing. That might sound weird but the actual details about the design don't really matter for this peice. What I want to talk about is the reasons I choose this design. First off, I wanted to move from 2D to 3D. I probably could make more 2D games and that would be easier, but I wouldn't have learned that much more about rendering if I did. 3D will provide tougher challenges. Second off, I decided that this project will use zero assets. I made a single sprite for Dark Room. I was going to make a whole set of animations for it, but I got tired of the whole process fairly quickly. Honestly, I have no desirer to be a artist, and I would rather focus on my programming. This next game will ownly use basic shapes and colors to represent things.
I going to be spending the next week or so studying up on 3D rendering in OpenGL, and I plan to hopefully right up so blog post about what I learned, so I better get started.