Greetings! This is my third post about my ongoing project: Galactic Warfare: Rise of Drones (GW:RoD). Introductions are not needed again, so let’s get straight to the milestone achievements and review!
Milestone 3
If you recall from last post, the third milestone was a live demo of the project at SGC!
SGC was a fun time, and I got to engage in a lot of interesting and helpful conversations with presenters and other game and software developers!
Below were the goals for Milestone 3:
Programming
- Render GLTF files using PBR.
- Implement an extensible system for input handling.
- Receive input that directly affects the game state.
- Implement sky boxes (cube maps).
- Implement a basic collision system (Axis-Aligned Bounding Boxes (AABBs), etc.)
- Implement a basic enemy (approaches player upon detection).
Art
- Texture player spaceship.
- Model enemy combatant.
- Texture enemy combatant.
- Model asteroids.
- Texture asteroids.
- Create, find, and/or generate sky box texture(s).
Despite this staggering set of goals I met with great success at SGC! With the time I needed to complete my work, I was able to get much more done than I previously was able to. I succeeded in implementing PBR rendering of GLTF files, a sky box, an advanced collision system (untested, but strictly feature complete), and input that affects the game state (i.e. moving around the player spaceship). I was also able to finish texturing the player spaceship.
From the onset of the milestone I considered the other objectives that are not completed as stretch goals (asteroids, and enemy, the poor input system that continuously gets deferred, etc.), so I am happy with the result! I was able to get feedback on mechanics of the game – not the engine – for the first time.
For the final milestone this semester, I plan to take a lot of time to evaluate my systems, reflect on what are the best courses of action in the Spring, and reassess what direction I want to take the project given the advice I have received.
Thank you for reading this Milestone post! Feel free to leave me a comment below!