Racer Game

Overview

This is my attempt for the first weekend of code ‘Weekend of Code’ in 2008. However I didn’t manage to get this completed on time, because I decided to take a big risk and use Chipmunk and OpenGL (in a 2D projection view) for the first time, despite not having any experience prior to the event.

The project is on my ever growing back burner, but I plan to upload something soon!

Basically my aim was to make a basic top-down racing game which has similar pick ups and weapons to Mario64, but obviously it would all be 2D.

Interestingly, I had a rather innovative moment where I decided that I could save myself manually coding maps or a map designer by using Adobe Illustrator as a UI for drawing the map polygon paths. These could be exported to SVG, so I could easily use Ruby (which as two great XML libraries, REXML and Hpricot) to parse the SVG XML into Chipmunk API calls in C. I would like to extend on this idea more maybe at another time as Illustrator could prove to be quite a nice ad-hoc 2D level editor when used like this.

Technology Used

• Language: C++ (in game), Ruby (SVG to Chipmunk C code)
• Libraries: OpenGL with SDL
• Graphics: Adobe Photoshop CS2, but mainly pen ’n paper!
• Map Design: Adobe Illustrator CS2, and Ruby