Month: November 2021

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The Follow Through

I made some progress with Cannons, but I decided to pivot back to working on CarCoder until it’s ready to be released on Steam. I’m not expecting some crazy success, but I feel like it would be fun to try. I believe the game has a lot of potential, but in its current state, I don’t think anyone will buy it. My guess is the work needed to polish up this game will take more time than its original development. Here’s my punch list so far:

Game Improvements

  • Use a better car model
  • Improve sounds
  • Make cameras more realistic and add nice transitions (CRT shader?)
  • Add dialogs
  • Fix lighting and terrain textures
  • Make streets and intersections more realistic
  • Improve UI (add a way to delete single instructions)
  • Improve the pedestrians
  • Add more levels (games like angry birds have over 700, IIRC I have around 14)
  • Optimizations and beta tests

Other Work That Isn’t Game Development

  • Add SSL to this website
  • Check on any legal issues from the assets in the game
  • Apply for Steam dev license/agreement
  • Marketing!

Thanks for reading!

Posted on

Cannons

Progress 1

I’ve been making an effort to post all my projects to GitHub because in the past I’ve lost a lot of work not making backups. I very much regret that I no longer have the code for:

  • A Quake 2 mod where you fight other players using the Q2 AI characters (similar to TABS)
  • The custom maps for the Q2 mod
  • A series of interactive 3D ASCII art I was making for an “installation”
  • A helicopter game I made when I was 14
  • A top-down military game like Rescue Raiders
  • A 3D wireframe game engine
  • Several raycasting engines
  • Anyway, you get the point!

Among those games, is one I started at least ten years ago that I called Cannons. It’s a mashup of Minecraft and an old DOS game called Scorched Earth (30 years old this year btw). I’m not sure, but I always liked the concept and it seemed like fun to make, so I started remaking it last night using the latest version of ThreeJS. So far, I haven’t used any of the old code but I’m hoping to somehow. The new version also uses NPM but I’m shying away from things like React for performance sake. Anyway, you can expect the next few posts here to be updates about this project. I want to add voxel-based physics to the game, but I still need to add terrain chunks and other “basic” Minecrafty biome mechanics. At the moment, it’s just one giant mesh with a single layer of blocks, and the tank is just suspended in the air at an arbitrary point to make it look like it’s on the ground. Later!