My B.S. thesis, that I finished about a year ago now, became a great hit and has been a stepping stone for me ever since. I was awarded a price from a major company here in norway for creativity, originality and unexpected effort for the project and have gathered a few valuable contacts in the process.
I ended up doing the project with a spanish girl who was an exchange student at my uni for a year. Turned out we worked great together. While she took care of the look and feel, handled gui and database programming, I took care of the framework and the graphics related programming.
Here's a link to our blog for the project:
blog
Since january I've been working on a hobby project on the side of work. It will become a dungeon crawler where you're a dwarf who must drink magical beer to stay in touch with his magical side. We've got a spell system set up that's heavily inspired by a lot of the ideas that has surfaced on the forums here at GDNet, and especially from the gathering of ideas effort that has been put into The Future of RPGs
We're going open source with this project, and our planning, our design and our code is available over at sourceforge:
Here
Due to a busy couple of weeks, I don't think the task section is fully up to date, neither is our wiki of design.
We've made some good progress lately though on the framework part of the game. I've done a major rehaul over the last two weeks, even though time hasn't really been available to do a major rehaul effectively, thus it has taken this much time.
About two weeks ago we were about to start adding actual gameplay code when we realized that we'd end up with a messy many to many relationship between components in our entity system, so we decided to rewrite our core to use observer pattern instead with an event manager singleton as the means of communication between components of an entity. As I rewrote to accommodate this new change, I also decided that I wanted to incorporate this new line of thought into the rest of our core as well, so that the update call now uses the observer pattern too. This is quite cool, since I can now just disconnect an entity from the GameManager's update call when it's dead for example, and that entity won't receive any more updates.
It's a new way of programming for me though, since it's a one way commuication way of programming. Like, if I want the position of the scenenode of my entity in my camera controller, I need to send an event from the scenenode component to the camera controller component, instead of just calling scenenodecomp->getPos(). It will make the code a lot cleaner though, I hope...
So I'm now gluing everything back together. I got rid of the player subclass of entity, and has made a couple of components take over the task that the player class was doing instead, which is the approach we want. Input Receiver and Camera Controller did the trick. Now I only have to put back in the physics and the dungeon creator, and we're back where I started two weeks ago, but with a lot stronger foundation humming underneath.
Over the next week we're going to wrap in CEGUI and add mouse picking, and that's when real gameplay code will start to grow.
