Introducing Project Kaiken

I lied.

My concerted effort to learn Nintendo Entertainment System assembly programming lasted about twelve hours: long enough to get a development environment set up, burn through some tutorials I've done before, and write a blog post about how "gung ho" I was.

It wasn't long before reading those memory maps began to eat away at my enthusiasm. Pattern Tables and Attribute Tables again reared their ugly heads and beat my motivation to dust. I turned my back on NES programming and went back to make serious efforts on my initial game engine project, written in C++ and using SDL.

I won't beat around the bush: this game engine sucks. It has "purely academic exercise" written on every pixel it renders. That said, great improvements have been made on it.

I was reminded that STL data structures exist and many, many places have seen <vector> and <list> added to clean up my sloppy-ass data management. While not ideal for high-performance gaming, it's much better than what I have been doing. Memory leaks have all but disappeared by using these tried-and-true classes over my disgusting solutions. Multiple sound effects can be played at the same time, and music tracks can be changed.

The engine even became stable enough to run more types of demos. A title screen is now present, as well as a basic platformer.

Not everything is sunshine and daisies however. Despite the code cleanups that have occurred and the new features that have been added, many key things are missing. In fact, calling it an "engine" at all is being quite generous. Everything is hard-coded except for the graphics data (images, fonts) and audio data (level music, sound effects). Not only is it impossible to add or adjust levels without recompiling the entire thing, but even simple things like controller configuration aren't possible. There is no simple way to do animation, levels have to be programmed 95% from scratch, and things such as gravity and AI are programmed into the levels, limiting code reuse and increasing programming difficulty.

Lots of things need to happen for the project to continue in a nice fashion. A short list would include and easy way to load a sprite sheet, define the animations that are included, and call for them to happen in-game. Not to mention that AI and gravity need to be broken out of the level's code and into their own for easier referencing (which is preferable over the copy/paste method). Some way of creating levels as external files would be great, but that's not a short-term goal right now.

Of course, once these things happen, then it would be nice to have a game concept to bring to life using the engine. I have a couple of rough ideas, but nothing solid or "fun" yet.

I'm not averse to going back to NES programming. Frankly, it's nice to have a final binary under 256 killobytes that I can easily send to people. Kaiken is a fat-ass project by comparison, the executable binary weighing in around a megabyte on its own, then there's the several megabytes of DLLs it depends on, and the megabytes of graphics and sounds. '

I haven't worked on this project in a couple of months now. In fact, I haven't really been doing much programming at all during that time. It's a fun hobby I ought to get back into. Maybe something good will come out of it.