LIBGDX

Week 7 and its server time!

Posted on by burf2000

So my mission was to release a basic version of Hack24 before Christmas, this is now seeming unlikely!  I do have a 24 hour GameJam coming up which I plan to abuse and work on Hack24.  I may just release the game on a single platform first (probably Android).  The main delay has actually been the Christmas spirit and wanting to do Christmas things 🙂

So, back on to the progress. I have started building the user registration server in NodeJS. The original Hack24 used ASP.net which worked well but felt a bit of an overkill.  As I want to rapidly prototype the game, NodeJS seemed a good way to go.  Mongo is being used as the datastore and Socket.IO will handle real-time movement tracking.

For the MVP I need the following:

  • User can Register
  • User can Login
  • User can post high scores
  • User can see high scores
  • Users in-game location is stored
  • Game world stored

Nice to have:

  • Reset password
  • User items
  • User Level
  • Admin  panel
  • User chat

In the original I used Apples GameCenter to do a lot of this, however as this is now multiplatform, I cant do this.  I also don’t really want to mix up Google Play users with GameCenter users and Steam users, it could all get a bit confusing.

Once this is done, I can then focus on finishing the game mechanics

We have Music, Sound, UI but no Dependency Injection

Posted on by burf2000

So another night coding Hack24 fueled by sugar and Redbull (well cheapo versions). I wanted to try and get Dagger2 working on my project so I could do Dependency Injection which is something I am interested in learning.   I timed boxed it to 1 hour and failed 🙁 This was due mainly to not understanding how it works with Kotlin. This project has a lot of moving parts to make my life more difficult, if it was a straight forward Android project, life would be fairly simple, however, it uses the LibGDX game engine which is cross-platform and normally in Java, and I am writing it in Kotlin. There seems to be not a single example anywhere of doing these 2 things together. My issue at the moment is with Gradle and the mass of gradle.build files that LibGDX has.

On the positive side, I did add a sound manager that does sound effects and music (quick win), I skinned the buttons, added the Hack24 logo and started building the factory methods to build the buildings in the game!

My focus is to build a minimal viable product of Hack24 before Christmas and release it on a single platform (Probably Android) as a soft launch.

Main areas I need to look at still:

  • Networking and the server side
  • UI for hacking a building
  • The player logon model, e.g Apple Game Center, Google Play etc

Lesson Learned : Sometimes pretty code is slower code!

Posted on by burf2000
Interesting lesson learned: I had written my own 3D engine for Hack24, however came across this book https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/building-3d-game-libgdx, the code was extremely well structured and I was about to bin my own framework and use this one as it was a bit further along.

I thought I would run a few performance tests, just to be on the safe side. Glad I did:
Theirs: 400 objects rendered: 22FPS
Mine: 4608 objects rendered: 15FPS