A game I made for Ludum dare 46.
Written in C++ with SFML.
The idea was to revisit a really old engine idea I had
around 20 years ago.
The idea is basically an extension of heightfield rendering with
support for see through objects,
which in turn the allows you to create any object you would like
based on a simple 2d map.
When I built it back in 1998-1999 it required front-to-back
heighfield rendering rendering with highly optimized handwritten
assembly in x86 utilising the MMX instruction set to max (in
visual studio).
To get graphics into the engine I wrote a Truespace 3D cob-file
renderer in Turbo Pascal which saved slices of the 3d image to
disk as .tga files.
It was beautiful... Unfortunately a hard disk crash erased the
code and all that remains now are a couple of printouts of the
pieces of the code :-(
The thought was that by 2020 it should be possible to throw
together an engine without putting all that effort into it. I
was pretty much right. A couple of interesting rendering issues
caused me some problems but I managed to put together the entire
engine without using any "real" 3d for the heightfield
rendering.
The tool chain was a lot simpler as well.
Tools like Magicavoxel can now save slice images as png files
:-)
The whole thing turned out pretty trippy and the game itself was terrible as usual.
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/of-the-dark
Tools used: Visual Studio 2019 SFML Notepad++ GIMP Blender Wings Milkshape 3D bfxr LMMS Bandicam VirtualDub