What the hell is jvgs -- Part I
Published on December 9, 2009 under the tag gamedev
This post is about jvgs, a game I wrote.
Java and Swing
Back in June, I was searching for a project to work on. At that time, I was reading a lot about automatic content generation in games. I became interested and tried to find a good concept to base a game on.
I am a regular reader of XKCD and I like the drawing style a lot. A “sketched” look is pretty cool for a game, so I started fooling around with noise. I first wrote an initial test in Java using swing.
C++ and OpenGL
Obviously, swing is not very well suited for games that require some graphical performance. So I ported it to C++/OpenGL/SDL (a combo I am very familiar with), and after some more coding, I ended up with something like this:
As you can see, at that time the idea would’ve been to develop some strategy game. As you can see, I was able to draw hills and forests. The problem with this was that every entity was drawn in a custom way (basically hard-coded). I needed some kind of image format that would allow me to still have a sketchy look and feel, so I implemented a subset of svg.
A concept please
After that, I still needed a game concept. That’s when I found my way to this beauty. This game had some deeper meaning, and that’s basically what I wanted in my game as well. Soon afterward, I had already written some code for a collision system, so I settled with a platform game.
I don’t know a lot of games based upon poetry, so that is the direction I chose. I started coding more, writing poetry, thinking of more ideas…
I didn’t know how the game would end until I was coding the last level. This might be why the story seems vague or non-existant, and I can confirm that. It’s more a random stream of thoughts, it’s not a story.
This post described some of the ideas behind jvgs. The next post about the project will be more technical and explain some of the details. Your feedback is, as always, very welcome.
Your most humble and obedient servant, Jasper Van der Jeugt