DevLOG of Cat Paradox Adventures


Everything now will be here explained as I make through the game develop process.

The game is been written in C++ with great help of the reasonably freestyled libraries SFML.

They cover almost everything related to 2d related gamedev, although they lack of ZIP/packaged filesystem, so all your game data will be exposed, and the deploy concept of the Win/Linux/iOS/Android, is based on a full build up on the SFML sources. A web based tool could be nice, like you upload your "base" (.cpp .h) sources, and the server builds up the 4 binaries for you. Qemu, Oracle Virtualization,...

SFML libraries gives us this functionallities : Network/HTTP comms, sound, collisions, input devices, GLSL shaders, Typo stuff, render & window stuff, timers,.. pretty complete and easy. Here you can download it for free : https://www.sfml-dev.org

I was pretty excited to change the soundtrack dinamically, and take advantage of the music as a reactive actor of the game, it helps us tell the story, and rewarding our progress with new variations. This wasn't supported by SFML, so I've developed a "time based realtime soundmixer" of seamless looped bits of music.

Also a realtime level editor was needed to place the colliders for the level design and walls. So I've made my own, using the same game source codes, just enablig if in compilation time by a #define 

You can test the collision while you edit them, hit space, and the .bin file with the geometric information of each collider is then created.

I've decided the backgrounds will be dinamic and GLSL shader animated, each level has it's own background shader, apart from the 2d image depicting the "box" in wich the Cat is locked.

So basically, now everything is ok, sound FX, music, main menu, highscores, collisions, level editor, basic enemies, time counters, ingame UIs, keyboard/joystick. It's playable. I don't now how in the industry this stage is called in the deve pipeline, but I guess now the task is to :

  • Improve and work hard on reward/risk gameplay mechanism
  • Improve enemies, better AIs, diferent punishments and behaviours on each new level.
  • New levels design, take benefit of the level editor.
  • test and iterate.

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