For the past few months I have been trying to work diligently in my free time on a shmup game. I've looked into many different aspects of game design and programming, as a result there has been a bit of revision here and there as I discover better ways to do things. One of the transitions is the integration with the language Python to assist with enemy, level, and bullet pattern scripting.

Life always seems to get in the way of me working on my game, but somehow in those small slivers of time I'm able to do enough good to further it along. Since my last post a few major milestones have been hit with the development of my game and the pieces are all beginning to come together. I'm very happy about these changes, though in no way am I near releasing it, there is still many things that need to be decided upon and built before I can start considering that.

I will get to the main topic in a second, first I would like to give a little explanation as to where I have been for these past two months. The last post I made was right before GDC while I was still working in Chicago. At the time I knew things were not working out between the company and I, so I was on a mission to find another job. I met a lot of great people at GDC and was able to learn much more about the industry first hand. It wasn't until a little while after GDC did I finally got in contact with the company Meteor Games in West Hollywood CA.

As stated in my previous post, my physics engine has reached a stable and acceptable state. As a result I have already begun on my next title which is intended to both showcase as well as stress test my physics code. I intended to leave the details of the title a mystery for now, but I will reveal a bit of an overview.

After using my physic code for a while and making necessary tweaks I have finally gotten to a point where I can put down the core aspects of it and move onto other sections of my upcoming game. The physics is not the best it could ever be, but it's runs very quickly and has a quality that is acceptable for what I'm trying to do.

I can only begin to express how happy I am. One of the major technical issues that has been holding my progress up is fine collision tests with oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) against other oriented bounding boxes. There is a little bit of knowledge online about this, although nothing that really explains how to generate a contact manifold. The contact manifold is basically a collection of points, normals, and distances which tell me where two objects are colliding and the essential data I need to feed back into my contact resolution phase.

It's been a while since I've last posted, though I assure you it's not because of lack of working on things. In late September I was working on getting my impulse based simulation into a working condition as well as wrapping my head around how friction is calculated into the system. I'm happy to report that both of these were a success and I had quite a fun time playing around with all the different things I could do with it.

So, I have been continually working on my physics code, trying to make everything stable. In particular I have been working on the collision response section, this dictates what happens when two bodies touch each other. Things have come a long way from what they were and I'm beginning to pick up on the mathematical concepts. Though, there are a still few things missing before any of this code can actually be used in a game.

While I was at SIGGRAPH 07 I picked up a book called Game Physics Engine Development. Since getting it I have been reading the book nearly non-stop and implementing the physics processing into my own code. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to get into real time physics simulations. Personally I'm about 4/5ths through the book and very happy with the results that I'm already able to see in my code.

After and long and bloody battle I have finally been able to get this website up. I didn't expect that I would have as many issues as I ran across, and in total it took up way too much of my time. However, besides some little tweaks it's completed and I'm very happy with the way it looks.