First Post

Ever since I was a kid, I've always wanted to design and create games. This blog will track my first real attempt at something beyond tic-tac-toe or connect four. I've always been a big fan of bullet hell shoot-em ups (shmups), so this project will be a basic attempt to create a shmup engine written using C++ and SDL. My biggest hope for this blog is that it will reach a point where it can be used as a road-map for future shmup creators. If the project goes well, consider this blog to be a guide. If it doesn't, consider this to be a list of things to avoid. Another hope is that this keeps me on track and organized, so if anyone is reading this and doesn't see an update for a long time, please e-mail me (shmup@matrisking.com) and kindly remind me to get my ass in gear.

Short Term Goals: The overarching goal of this project is to create a very basic shmup where you can shoot at some static enemies and they'll shoot back. I've created five benchmarks:

• Phase 1: Display the player's ship on the screen, move it around with arrow keys (complete)
• Phase 2: Enable to the player ship to fire bullets (complete)
• Phase 3: Create some static enemies (complete)
• Phase 4: Enable the enemies to shoot at you on regular intervals (complete)
• Phase 5: Implement basic collision detection (complete)

This is pretty much the most basic shmup I can imagine. I'd also like to adopt a version control system and some standard comment/documentation schemes. Provided I make it this far, I will attempt to extend this functionality with...

Long Term Goals (roughly ordered by level of ambition):

• Intelligent collision detection, which should go a long way to creating "bullet hell"
• Moving enemies
• Non-linear bullet paths
• Score
• Powerups
• Multiple player weapons
• Learn how to draw (or make friends with an artist, or hire an artist)
• Learn how to compose (or make friends with a musician, or hire a musician)
• Create an XML representation of levels
• Create a level editor
• Create an Android port of this engine
• Create an XNA port of this engine

Future posts will (hopefully) contain the following:

• Status updates
• Links to useful resources that I find
• Discussions of the various software engineering dilemmas I will encounter