Sat
10
Sep 2011

Part of the National Conference on Computer Games Development was COMPO Games Bonanza - a competition where teams of up to 4 people have to develop a game in 9 hours. Our team was: Krzysztof Kluczek (Krzysiek K.), Tomasz Dąbrowski (Dab), Piotr Iwanicki (zxc) and me. That was our first participation in a contest in such configuration and it worked quite well. Zxc made all the graphics, sound and recorded voice. He was also doing game design by insisting on making this game cool, while we focused more on technical details :) Rest of us was coding. Music is done by Krzysiek K. in Fruity Loops, also during the contest.

Here is a video recorded by 2009xor. You can see our game presented by Krzysiek K. from the beginning of the video until 1:50.

The theme for this competition was "surrealism". We came up with a game about Salvador Dali. His thoughts (the players) are fighting in his mind - that's the story. Obstacles on the map are eyes which always look at some player. Periodically some bigger object appear, like a cat in a box or a guitarist with spider legs - so thanks to zxc's creativity the game is really surreal/psychedelic :)

Our work went quite well. We managed to implement most of what we planned - a difficult task. Of course we weren't happy about how the project is going all the time, there was some rush and frustration. But there were also epic moments, especially when Krzysiek K. implemented bloom shader literally in 10 minutes, right before deadline!

The game is written in C++. We used a framework coded by Krzysiek K., same as on IGK conference in previous years, that just initializes Direct3D, handles texture loading, mouse and keyboard input etc. Playing sound and music is implemented using FMOD library. Right before the competition I figured out how to handle multiple gamepads using Raw Input API. Unfortunately that decision forced us to implement only particular models of Logitech gamepads - the ones that we took with us and used during the compo.

Our game makes sense only for 2-4 players playing simultaneously. During the presentation we used two wired gamepads, one wireless gamepad and the keyboard. Players moving on the top-down view fight each other. By killing opponents they gain experiance, and after leveling up they upgrade to better weapon.

I'd like to thank everyone who voted for us, congratulate other teams that participated in the competition and thank organizers for arranging this competition - so traditional in our community - during the conference. See you next year!

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