Hello, welcome to my first status report for Hit It!. Hit It! is a rhythm game where the user hits drum pads with drum sticks to the beat of a song. I will be programming the user interface of the game with OpenGL and C++, and I will also be writing the code for overall gameplay flow. I chose to do graphics programmings on this project mainly because I am interested in working in the video games industry as a graphics programmer, and because I enjoyed taking Computer Game Programming last fall, which required me to make games with C++ & OpenGL.
This week on Monday we had our project proposal presentation. Over the last 2 weeks, I helped create the slide deck for the presentation and I also worked on the graphics framework for the game. I am following tutorials on graphics programming from an online textbook at https://learnopengl.com/. At the beginning of the semester, this game had zero code. Since then, I have worked on the following things:
- Importing libraries for graphics programming into the code base: glfw, glm, and glad
- Creating a window with glfw
- Drawing a square in the window
Right now the game looks like this:
The game can draw a square… woah!
Each of the 3 steps listed above took several hours. I had to do quite a bit of internet research to figure out how to create a Makefile and how to compile our game. Then I needed to learn how to import glad, glm, and glfw into the codebase. It took me around 5 hours or so to draw a square once the window was created, because I had to debug an issue related to how I configured my vertex and fragment shaders.
Next week I would like to add texture rendering into the game. I also want to be able to import placeholder artwork and maybe even have font rendering before the end of next week. In our schedule, we have allocated 3 weeks after the proposal presentation to test our technologies. Font rendering isn’t really necessary right how, but it would be nice if I can get it working by the end of next week so that I can use it in our prototype.
Right now I am on track to create a simple rhythm game prototype before spring break. I think that the biggest challenge for me moving forward will be balancing school with interviews and job searching. Interviewing and filling out applications takes a lot of time, which means I’ll need strong time management skills to stay on top of everything.