Sol Streak 3D

Alright!  Arkanoid 3D has been renamed Sol Streak 3D.  The game is nearing completion! For which I am grateful. Programming the finishing touches and fine tuning the game seem to take just as much time as programming the guts of the program.  I am happy with the progress I have made and hopefully will be able to consider this game finished.

Since the last update I have decided to use the FMOD audio library for the background music and sound effects.  The music and effect where provided to me by my brother, aka Yukaflux.  I have created from scratch a simple particle engine, and fine tuned the collision detection and response.  I have also spent some time with blender to make some models that are a little more interesting that just cubes.  I added buttons to the main menu, that took some time to create using GIMP.

Like it's been said countless times, a picture is worth 1000 words. So here is a picture:

And if a picture is worth so many words, a video must be worth hundreds of thousands...

And to top it all off, here is a link to the page dedicated to the game, which contains a link to the download.

Sol Streak 3D

If you find any bugs, or have any suggestions, feel free to email them to me.

Arkanoid 3D

My current personal side project is to create a simple 3D version of Arkanoid.  I will be using Direct3D 10 and C++.  Other than DirectX and a yet-to-be-determined audio library, I won't be using any third party libraries.  This project serves a few purposes, 1: to develop a game from start to finish, that is complete. (Eg, start-up screen, menu screen, loading screens, ....) and 2: To be used as a demo to show to different recruiters, to portray my ability level.

So far all of my personal projects have had a specific goal in mind, not one of them had the goal of being a complete game.  Most of the time the goal was to learn some new technology.  For instance I created a Pong game, with the goal to learn Allegro 5.  Although the game was fairly complete it wasn't very polished.  Later on I made another pong game: Paddledroid, with the intent of learning how to program for the Android OS.  Paddledroid again, was fairly complete, but it still lacked a bit of fine tuning, and features.   On another occasion I put my efforts towards developing a tower defence game that I titled RoadBlock.  The purpose of that was to learn a bit about graph traversal, and different algorithms like the A* path-search algorithm.  The list goes on...

So this time around my goal is to develop a complete game, that has all the features and refinement (as much as is feasible) of a game that is fit for distribution.   Bear in mind that when I say this I refer more to the gameplay quality, for when it comes to graphic design, and anything art related I have a relatively big handicap.

I am currently very happy with current status of the project. To handle the different states of the game, such as intro screen, menu, and gameplay states, I created a state manager.  The game currently has an introduction sequence, a main title/menu screen, and a game running state.  In the next day or two I will add a state for when the game ends.  The Main menu only consists of 2 options, start and exit, all that is left is to find an adequate font and a background image.  The game state is working and functional.  The only things that need tweaking are: the 3D models for the ball, paddle, and bricks, and the collision detection for ball-box collisions.  After that the game will be fully functioning and it will be time to add in some eye candy.  Things like fancier animations when bricks get hit, sound effects and background music, and other aesthetics.

So far I am happy with the progress.  Visit Arkanoid 3D - Adam Kromm for more info.