Hey Guys,

Over the past 6 months I have been working on a 2D game while at school for my term lab project, the engine is based on the GCC architecture and has been my main basis for learning engine design and game play programming while at school.

[IMG:http://i40.tinypic.com/c72bn.jpg]

This is Orbito, a physics based puzzle game where the player or players are required to use atoms and covalent bonds to create molecules, when these molecules can make no more bonds they are 'completed' and tallied up for a player score. The game development itself has tested my skills and patience in not only programming, but also managing a team and developing my skills as a musical artist, at the end of the project although satisfied to be finished with it, I feel like it is not 'done' and I could have made things so much better. However I feel about the project which I have a love/hate relationship with as it was not only my first game ever made but also the game that taught me what not to do in a game engine, I would like to share this with this community and especially with Rez and Mike, who have given constant advice, wisdom, and shared their valuable knowledge of making games countless times with us all, I hope someone finds this game fun and I would love to hear back from everyone one their thoughts. Also as I know that most of the community here is also relatively new to game development and I would hope that I could answer any questions on how I did a particular aspect of the game, or even what I felt I could have done better in areas.

Orbito
1-4 players

Controls

Keyboard:
Player 1:
Move - Up, Down, Left, Right
Fire - Enter

Player 2:
Move - W, A, S, D
Fire - F

Player 3:
Move - I, J, K, L
Fire - ;

Player 4:
Move - Numpad: 8,4,5,6
Fire - Numpad: +

All Players Joystick:
Move - Thumbstick 0
Fire - Button 0

The GUI isn't incredibly self explanatory, on the play screen each player is required to press their fire button, which will map them to keyboard or joystick.

The game was meant to play with joysticks but has the keyboard option as a fallback, you also may spot bugs, this is expected as it was only really 1 programmer and 1 artist, we had a few more people but they didn't pull their weight to the point that there is nothing in game of theirs, so if you spot something let me know and I will investigate it.

Orbito - Download

Post-Mortem

Yes it was, it was a 2D game that we made as part of my video game design and development course.

Did the game run for you Hondero?

I showcase the game at school next Wednesday, so this feedback is nice to hear.

Hmm, that is strange, It is hard for me to know what the actual problem is, we only had a few test computers and without being able to debug the code I don't have enough information. I would try the following things

- Reinstall, if you installed into program files it shouldn't be a problem, but try a non-system directory
- If you have switchable graphics, especially Nvidia, for some reason they don't have a good API for turning on the discrete graphics card with OpenGL, at least as far as I have found. Try to give Orbito an entry in your display drivers control panel
- We have never actually tried the game on a 32 bit system, this shouldn't make any difference though as the game is built for 32 bit and the VC++ redistributable that is packaged with the game is 32 bit as well.
- The game uses OpenGL rather than DirectX, this shouldn't be an issue though as Windows has long since resolved their 'sabotaged' OpenGL drivers from Vista

Unfortunately I have to move onto new projects so I don't have alot of time to work on this game anymore, If you keep trying to get it working let me know what the issue is though. Sorry you couldn't get the game running though.

I honestly haven't explored using debugging techniques like mini-dumps, and I don't know what map file you are referring to, is there a method visual studio has to determine which exception is being thrown?

Thanks for the feedback, it hurts, but the truth is these are the exact same conclusions I came to myself, the game suffered alot from poor planning, it started as a story driven game, but once I realized that my team wasn't going to pull their weight I had to re-work things.

The molecule creation are all (mostly) theoretically possible as it works on basic covalency, however there are many different rules I didn't have time to bring in.

At the end of this game taking a step back, I know it could be alot better, and I hope to revisit the idea again some day.