Friday, April 14, 2023
Qard Demos
I had Qard game engine just laying around, with few features implemented here and there, because I didn't really knew how to proceed with various unsolved issues I had in the engine.
I became fed up with the lack of any progress, despite overflowing with ideas and a desire for game development in my own engine. So, just as I always do when testing the capabilities of my new creation, I started crafting projects – in this instance, simple games. Boy, that was probably the most fun I've ever had in this situation!
- The first was a simple bouncing ball, that evolved into 1000 colorful bouncing balls.
- Second demo was to test (and develop) a simple input system, using just pointer events.
- With the third demo I focused on moving animated sprites.
- Fourth demo was first shot at UI elements, creating buttons (remember, it meant to code the whole thing: drawing buttons on canvas, handling pointer events and properly response to them).
- Fifth demo was once again input, this time keyboard. It may sound easy, but I had to finally decide how to tackle key customization.
- Sixth demo added sound and more serious gameplay. This time it was GTA 1 style top-down car driving. I failed to implement handbrake turns, but I'm quite satisfied with everything else.
- Seventh demo kept the high standards and it was walking figure using sprite sheets. To make things even more interesting, besides obvious keyboard I also added pointer support, where the figure walked to the position you clicked on. And it had a gun :-)
- Eighth demo was tiled top-down world of pseudo-unlimited size, where the engine doesn't draw off-screen, the world is draggable using mouse and tiles could be edited.
- Ninth demo was rocket like Asteroids, only without the asteroids.
- I became too cocky, so tenth demo was finally an attempt to make rotating 3D cube. I failed as usual.
- Eleventh demo was a nod to the first one, but now with collisions. I had to generate just 100 balls to prevent my laptop bursting in flames.
- Twelfth demo explored platformer capabilities, generating fast moving multi layered parallax scenery.
- I've been resisting long enough, so lucky 13 is finally a pong. Both paddles are controlled using the same mouse, with inverted axes to make things more interesting.
- Fourteenth demo was kept blank for some reason.
- Fifteenth demo was simple mouse drawing.
- Sixteenth demo was top-down moving Qule with mouse steering and health bar.
I stopped there, because I encountered some big missing pieces that may change the way games are created in the engine, so basically all the demos would need to be updated.
But because of the fun I had I've decided to do even more simple demos like that in the future, maybe some inspired by Liero or Mini Metro.
As I was hoping for, during the trial and error I used the TDD approach many times – write the intended code for the task and then figured out Qard's inner workings to make the code run.
Because Qard utilizes QetriX way of programming, when working with sound and input I spotted similarities in Qard and was able to unify the code so it could be merged into the Framework as services.
Qard itself has been redesigned as QPage alternative and functions has been distributed into common libraries.