BizzyBud Games - Idea comes to Life!

The BizzyBud Games website is complete, up and working. It has a simple design yet it serves it purpose well.

I want to program the best possible game I can, which means producing something very enticing for the target audience- the young casual gamer. I want to have the best graphics, coolest sounds, and most enveloping music.

I want(ed) to develop a team and have a place where we could communicate. I thought "if this is something that would be useful for me, maybe it would be useful for other people too" which is the basis for the design of the site.

I hope it becomes a destination for many ambitious artists and developers.

RTS Menu System

I just finished programming the build menu aspect of the game. I spent a couple days just designing it, figuring out what I wanted and how it would be used, and I'm happy to say I achieved the exactly what I was looking for. Multiple menus can be added and scrolled through quickly and easily. Items can be added to these menus, then shown as disabled, enabled, ready, and animated.

The design was based off of the Command and Conquer series build menus, which is a common implementation among RTS games.

There were a few road bumps and stressful moments, especially getting the scroll feature to determine whether there were any items to scroll to or back to, but in the end the desired result was achieved.

Modular Coding

I was curious as to how larger(commercial) games are structured and organized and after looking at the source code to Quake3 I gained a new understanding of modular coding.

I reorganized the RTS Engine and it's far easier to interpret. This new organization creates a type of "standard" for code format that made me realize I had code where it didn't belong. I put the code in the right place and now its more modular then ever.

The engines development process is coming along great! Things only seem to be getting better.

RTS Engine Design

After a few days of thinking and exploring, I've managed to come up with a pretty thorough design for this RTS Engine.

The design looks something like this...

There are three primary parts to the framework; a menu system, in game GUI and the actual RTS.

The menu system includes things such as typical buttons and cursor functions. The in game GUI displays and allows interaction for build buttons, radar, resources, and the like. The actual RTS part of the engine creates and gives functionality to all game objects such as weapons, units, structures, AI and tech levels.

Today I programmed a good portion of the menu system. I would have to say this project is about 2% completed so far.

Trying a new engine - Unity3D

I am completely blown away with the way Unity3D has "revolutionized" game development.

After fooling around with Unity for a couple days I've realized how quickly this amazing engine allows a developer to create. In many situations there's often a battle between complexity and flexibility. The more complex something is often times the more flexible it also is. Unity manages to keep things simple yet maintain much of the flexibility needed to develop just about anything you can think of.

A couple cons that come to mind is the dependency someone might have on Unity when developing games, and the fact that it's not open source. If you find it can't do something the way you want to, you're out of luck.

I've continued designing the RTS engine and am almost ready to start programming. I'm going to be using Blitz3D.

The plan is to eventually port it to BlitzMax with use of the Leadwerks engine, and then later create a Windows GUI which allows a person to develop an entire RTS game without a single line of code.

This will be far into the future, but as you can see, ambitions are high.

I found my search results to be very limited for RTS engines, and non that were 3D. The closest thing I found to the engine I'm designing was the incomplete RTS Maker, which can be found here.

The developer seems to be pretty excited about his project, though I haven't seen any real progress with it, and I it seems there are better ways to approach it.

We'll see what happens.

RTS Engine

After a year of working on my Real Time Strategy game I've realized my expectations for it were far larger then the design allowed. The plan was to make a simple "RTS" which I would then convert to an engine that could be reused by me and other programmers.

This process has been a bit backwards, considering you would typical want to create the engine before the game. It's like trying to build a house without any tools.

I've made a lot of discoveries in programming this game that will definitely come in useful in the future.

After my RTS programming experience, reading a few books, many articles and blogs, I can confidently say I'm ready to make a game engine.

I'll be posting what this design has to offer soon.

Feel free to download what progress was made on the rts by clicking the link below.
http://benlabbe.com/files/blabzrts_0.1.0.zip