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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  13d ago (text post)   431 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for December 17, 2024

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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You didn't think this was all just about "boids" did ya?

I finished cleaning up the code, and while there might be a way to compress / segment it even more I'm pretty happy with the result. It's still a bit unwieldy, but I no longer have to scroll past an endless stream of shader initialization code to find a variable I want to tweak.

This means I could move on to something slightly more fun. There once was a game called Phobia. I'm not sure if it was ever more than a demo for DirectX, but it had a surprisingly compelling game loop, where a horde of aliens would come at you, some sort of a space marine, and you'd have to dispatch them using various weapons. The horde was endless, so it was really only a question of how many times can you pull off squeaking through to pick up a power up allowing you to deal unholy levels of damage, and what kill count you could rack up, before finally succumbing to your enemies.

This was an old game, and all the logic was run on the CPU, so I doubt there was ever more than a couple hundred enemies on screen at any given time. Wouldn't it be fun if you could redo the whole thing on a GPU with enemy counts going well into hundreds of thousands? So I downloaded some open source assets, and recreated the basic setup. Little is happening so far, other than the monsters chasing you, so the next step will be implementing a compute shader that handles shooting and killing them.

Have you played any survivor genre games like Halls of Torment?

I'm pretty sure I played something that fits the bill, but no specific title (other than the one I mentioned) comes to mind, and I'm not familiar with the ones people are bringing up.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=JdQweTEsOUE

it had a surprisingly compelling game loop, where a horde of aliens would come at you, some sort of a space marine, and you'd have to dispatch them using various weapons. The horde was endless, so it was really only a question of how many times can you pull off squeaking through to pick up a power up allowing you to deal unholy levels of damage, and what kill count you could rack up, before finally succumbing to your enemies.

Oh, like Crimsonland?

Never played it so can't tell you, but by the looks of the screenshots and blurbs, yeah kinda. I think Phobia was more basic, but still loads of fun.

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