Hey, 🙂 I worked on the menu in the last days:
This is the main-menu:
And this is screen, where you can see your progress in the game and select the level you want to play: ( Every level will have its own thumbnail in the final version)
Any suggestions? 🙂
Hey, 🙂 except playing Mass Effect 😉 , i worked on the HUD of Grappling Hook:
So I almost finished the visual stuff.
Now I will concentrate on an overview map, new levels and the story.
Screenshot: 🙂
Hey, 🙂 it has been a while since the last update. So what has changed?
Here is a current screenshot:
I’m still working on textures and the hud right now.
Hope you like it. 🙂
Hey, 🙂 in the last days I worked on the visuals of the game. I looked for a new visual style, which looks cool, fits to the target-group and the game and is easy to do for me. My biggest inspirations were Tron, Matrix and Star Wars.
Till now I have added a bloom-shader to the rendering, created new textures (some are animated now) with GIMP and created a model for the grappling hook bolts with Blender.
Here is a screenshot of the first level with new textures. There are still a couple of textures I have to recreate.
What do you think of the new style?
Do you have cool ideas how I can improve it?
Hey guys, 🙂 Grappling Hook is written entirely in Java and based on the jMonkeyEngine, which is also a written in Java. I want to explain a bit, why I think that Java is currently one of the best programming languages for game development.
Yes, that is the truth. Many people think that Java is slow, because it was, in the beginning. But things have changed and when you look at current benchmarks Java is in average only twice as slow as C/C++.
When you want to make Crysis 3, then it would be no option to write the entire game and engine in Java. But competing with huge companies like Crytek, Epic or ID Software makes no sense for a small indie team at all, from my point of view.
I had to work a long time with Visual Studio and also tried some other IDEs and text-editors, but none of them was such a good, stable and helpful tool as Eclipse is for me.
Right now Grappling Hook has more than 100 source code files so I need a good tool, which supports me. Code completion, syntax-highlighting, refactoring and a powerful search function are essential for a high development speed.
And this features work perfect in Eclipse, not like e.g. IntelliSense in Visual Studio for C++. While working on one big project I had to delete the IntelliSense database every day by hand to make it working again.
In game development you need different kinds of data structures and containers, like linked lists, vectors, trees… You also play much around with strings and need many mathematic functions. In the Java library all this and much more waits for you. You don´t have to search new libraries for all this basic stuff.
Most of it is has also a good interface and is easy to use. In the current Java version you didn’t even have to care about iterators and can use them like in Python:
for( Element e : list) {
// Do something with the element e
}
Thats really nice, because I iterate a lot through different kinds of data structures. ( But be careful doing this every frame multiple times, because every iteration needs a new iterator-object. )
I am not the best C++ programmer and destroyed the stack of my applications multiple times. It took me hours to track the problem and in some cases I didn’t find it at all. In Java and every other language with managed memory you simply don´t have such problems.
Memory leaks are also not that bad, because of the garbage collection. Garbage collection doesn’t mean that you have no memory leaks at all, but they are not such a bit issue and with the built in memory profiler they are easy to track.
There are many other small points, why a like Java for game development, but that were the most important.
Java is not my favorite programming language for every task, but in game development I am 4 to 6 times faster than with C++. And being able to develop fast is very important to me.
What is your favorite programming language for game development and why?
I created a trailer of Grappling Hook:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_N5-bWPgBiI&ap=%2526fmt%3D18
Hope you like it. 🙂
The game is written in Java and I am using the jMonkeyEngine.
Tomorrow I will provide some more information about the technology behind the project.
There are some more information about the Grappling Hook game and it´s status on this page.
Graphics and story making good progress. After my last play-test with a 3d artist I had a long talk with him, what can be done to improve the graphics of the game in an economical way. Â I had a look at concept art of Star Wars, Blade Runner and some other Sci-Fi-Worlds to gather new ideas for the visual design and created some (poor coder-style 😉 ) sketches. With that in my hands I looked at some free 3D modeling tools, which I already used a bit some years ago.
Wings 3D: This is easy to use and has a clean interface, but it crashed on my machine a few times. It also has no support for animations.
GMax: This is a slim version of 3D Studio Max. When you are firm with 3D Studio Max it is easy to use. It is a bit buggy, the development was stopped in 2005 and the only way to export stuff is with a MD3-export plugin. It is also not clear if it is allowed to use the models created with this in your own game.
Blender: In the first two hours I swear about the interface, but with some time you can habituate. Blender has a strong community, runs stable and has all features that are needed for creating game models and animations. It also has an own game engine and uses Python as a scripting language, which is very cool.
Because Blender is the only free 3d modeling tool which is actually stable and suitable for game development I spend more time with it and created a new bolt for the grappling hook device. Currently it is not ingame, because a texture is missing and I am not proud enough of it to show you a screenshot. ^^
I also had a look at graphics shader programming. Within the next days I will probably add a Screen Space Ambient Occlusion shader to improve the visual quality and give some more depth clues. I hope this will be a good way to fake shadows. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion is analyzing the differnces of the depth-buffer for every pixel and some random neighbours, to calculate a new brightness for the pixel.
I just installed WordPress, so this will be the website for all future games I will develop.
The working title for my current project is GHook. Tomorrow I will fill this website with more informations about GHook and the development.
