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I’ve decided to change course. Drastically. The fluid engine works nicely, and although it’s fun to play with, it’s not exactly a game just yet. I had this idea, which I alluded to in my previous post, of making it into a creative construction game. You’d be a beaver, and you’d have to use twigs and branches, floating in the water, to build a dam.
My mind is always full of ideas that I’ll never have time for. But occasionally, one of them does get executed. This is one of those times.
Beavers live on wood, bark and aquatic plants. I would have guessed that they ate fish, but they don’t.
Beavers can hold their breath for up to 15 minutes.
No truism is always true, not even this one. I recently clashed with two common conceptions in software engineering:
The problem, in this case, is the heart of my little content management system, Utterson. As I discussed previously, I want all content to live in a Git repository, which is read and interpreted (later, also written) by the CMS. For example, I would create a blog using magic file extensions like this:
I’ve been doing more experimenting with the engine, trying to come up with a workable puzzle concept. Below are some videos and reasonings.
First off, the game objective. Assuming that it’ll have something to do with the fluid, one possibility is that the player has to make the fluid flow in a particular way or direction. We could represent this as having to “paint” particular objects with colours that are injected into the fluid. For example, in the video below, the player would have to paint the top box red and the bottom box green. (The opposite would make for a rather more difficult puzzle!) The boxes don’t yet react to paint in any way.
This week has been one of mostly refactoring. I’ve been streamlining the code to make it easier to add new objects and features later on. This will prove useful, because the gameplay clearly needs a lot more experimenting to get it right.
I had hoped that the editor would allow me to quickly test gameplay concepts by using “soft rules”: rules that are communicated to the tester verbally by me, instead of being enforced by the program. For example, I could say “Now try moving the orange ball into the blue rectangle, but only moving the green blocks.”
To be able to test different configurations, I had a rudimentary text-based file format to describe levels in. It was fairly simple and easy to edit, but still, hand-typing coordinates is not my idea of fun. It was time to build a graphical editor.
In the days of MS-DOS, things were simple. If you developed a game, you usually wrote it for one specific VGA or SVGA resolution, such as 320x200 or 640x480. If someone’s video card did not support this resolution: tough luck.
This week I worked hard on getting the fluid solver in the style of Jos Stam working. The basics were easy enough, but Stam makes some simplifying assumptions, so the continuation was not quite trivial. But combined with what I learned in my earlier work on the free-surface simulator, I managed to put together a fast, stable, flexible and pretty fluid solver that I’m more than a little proud of.