Spooky

Manu Marin
Game from scratch in c++/directx11/uwp for a one-month game jam, halloween themed.

October 31st 2016

GAME

• First Person Shooter
• Kill all enemies with treats and candies, room-by-room to open it up
• When the room opens, you can hear a sound and the doors turns green, you can pass thru.
• When all rooms are open, a boss will appear (see the dark red room in the minimap) and you'll have to defeat it. It's a bit hard!

Link to a video here (OneDrive): video

INSTALL

• This Appx bundle is not signed for Store, but for Test/Developer.
• Right-click on Add-AppDevPackage.ps1 and "Run with Powershell" (Admin mode)
• Or double-click on .appxbundle if you have certificates installed already

ASSETS

• Code, design, sprites, texture, effects by myself
• Sounds created with Bfxr
• Other sounds from Freesounds.org (see sounds.txt)
• Main title font by http://www.fontspace.com/cloutierfontes

CONTROLS

• Mouse and Left-Click to look and shoot

• WASD - For movement

• F1 - Help screen

• F5 - Toggle Fullscreen

• Tab - Toggle Minimap

• Esc - Exit or Menu

TOOLS

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition
• C++ / DirectX11 / DirectXTK (I started from scratch using the DX Sample)
• The code does not use any lib or code from any other library
• GraphicsGale + Paint.net for sprites
• https://twistedwave.com/online/# for sound editing

POSTMORTEM

Technical:

• It randomly generates all rooms using BSP trees. Randomly generate room-profiles.
• Only renders/update the room you are
• BSP Portals were generated but does not make use of it in runtime.
• Technically it is 2D (for collision/intersection against level). 3D for shotgun bullets.
• Spotlight effect achieved tweaking exp fog density depending on where pixel is
• 3 Pixel Shaders / 2 Vertex Shaders
• Uses DirectXTK lib for Audio, Input.

What was right:

• Reducing scope at right time
• Not overengineering
• Not making an engine but a game. Forgetting about internal code quality (ugly code). Just one month.
• Not data driven, all hardcoded. Iteration times were fast enough.

What was wrong:

• I made everything and spent more time on core than gameplay
• On-the-fly design changes during development
• Random level generation. It took too much time specially make all rooms connected.
  • Sometimes there are room clusters disconnected and some teleports are created

ORIGINAL IDEAS

• Originally it was going to be a light RPG where you fight against bourocracy and other issues as an adult.
• Due 5-minutes rule, I changed the design
• The second design was a FPS but more focused on Mental Illness enemies (for awareness). Original ways to kill those ones.
• Due time-constraint I changed a little de design as I wasn't sure if I was going to achieve a fun experience doing that.

KNOWN ISSUES

• Some rooms can be generated disconnected. It's a major issue, but happens few times. Restart then.

  • Algorithm to find disconnected clusters has some bug.

• Bad performance on Fullscreen on huge target sizes (4K)

  • Because the game RenderTarget is created out of actual Target and the Pixel Shader is unoptimized

-Manu gyakoo@gmail.com