BAM! 3D.

Porting my alchemy game engine to C++ wasn't that hard. In fact, less than a week after my brother told me to make a commercial game out of it, I was done. During that time we both brainstormed a bit about how this game would come to be. It was a very simple concept. Basically, recipes are used to create either new elements, weapons, spells or locations. The first three are straight-forward. Elements are used for recipes, weapons are used to kill monsters, and spells are used to either help yourself or kill monsters. Locations were special, as they served two purposes.

First, let me tell you the concept of my game. It's an idea I had that I have reworked into an action RPG. Originally it was going to be a cosmic horror dating sim, set in the world I called Digit-5. However, with the idea of using this element system for my game, I decided to turn it into a platform action RPG. But I didn't want to completely throw away the dating sim element.

By creating locations and decorating them, you can change the world around you, giving you advantages, but also allowing you to make it more challenging for yourself. It also serves as a way to woe the three aspects of the Goddess. I won't go into much detail with this, by the way.

So in the first week I worked on the framework of my game engine, meaning, figuring out how to create game states and game state transitions. After that, it was graphics time. Of course, it would still be in its testing phase.

The first thing I did was figuring out how to do perspective projections. I was still a beginner with OpenGL, despite my experience with Minecraft modding. So, the first thing I did was test everything in orthographic projection. It wasn't hard, I already worked in that projection. But then it was time for me to move onto perspective projection. It wasn't easy, and the first week was brutal. In the end I ended up making my own version of gluPerspective, which I didn't even need in the end anyway, but it did help me a bit with understanding how glFrustum worked.

At that point it was time to do my master plan. You see, ever since I've seen games like Super Paper Mario or Crush, I was wondering how hard it would be to allow people to make a smooth transition between orthographic and perspective projection. Turns out it wasn't that hard.

So then I decided to make a completely new test. Create a camera object, add some boxes to render, and have the switch between the two projections happen using the space bar. When I showed this test to my brother, at first he would see just a few ugly colored rectangles. But the moment I hit the space bar, BAM! 3D.

I then proceeded to make about five more "camera tests". More like excuses to play with this.

"It's gonna be sold."

Okay, here's the thing. For the past few weeks I've done nothing but coding, something I would never do. Okay, sure, I've been playing with Source Filmmaker a bit since it recently came out, but I've mostly been working on coding.

I've mostly been working on a game, or rather, a game engine. Sure, that's not special, you might say. And yeah, it isn't that special. But what most people don't realize is that coding is hard dukey. Now I'm not unfamiliar with coding or video game code. I've been modding Minecraft since about two years, and I've poked around in the Terraria code, and trust me, as a coder you do not want to do that. Don't get me wrong, Terraria is a great game, it's just very poorly coded.

But yeah, ever since I was a wee lad I always dreamed of creating my own stuff, or at least my own game. In my youth, I've created various concepts for games, most of which do not work. The problem lies in the fact that I rarely forget a good idea, and I did make quite a lot of ideas. Thing is, ideas are great and all, but they're worthless when they don't get executed. And, well, I just can't let go of ideas unless they're executed or I figure out that yeah, they aren't that good anyway.

This brought me to QBasic, a great tool for me to get familiar with programming languages. I created small stuff, mostly nothing, some pretty hacky, most of my time went into modifying the QBasic Gorillas game. I do remember that I did make an Indiana Jones fan animation in QBasic using ASCII, but it got lost in my several hard drive crashes, I don't know, I always had the tendency to break the computers I had. Later I learned Javascript and PHP, after which it was only a small step to Java.

So, let's just skip ahead, when I started Minecraft modding. I originally wanted to create a Scooby-Doo mod, but I found out that simple boxes weren't sufficient. So I made a little API for myself called Turbo Model Thingy, which allowed me to create trapezoids. So then I got these retarded suggestions like, add spheres, or, add Wavefront OBJ support. Which I actually did. To make a long story short here, I never got to make this Scooby-Doo mod, and instead focused on maintaining Turbo Model Thingy, later also Nitro Model Thingy.

Nope, not a single model...

So during these two years, I went to college, sort of, and I began thinking about Android developing. I've been wanting to do mobile games ever since I got my first Nokia phone or TI-83, I forgot which I got first, and since Android used Java, it was the perfect platform for me. But I wasn't confident about my skills, so I decided to just practice by making my own version of a game I've been playing for a while on my phone at that point, which was about a few months ago.

It was called Alchemy, where you combine crap to make new crap. Fun and all, but in the end there are only so many combinations you can make. I mean, at most you can make 144400 combinations (380 elements), and some elements can't even be used in combinations. So I decided to program my own version, only mine would be different. Instead of having only two elements react, you could make more than two elements react, by putting them in a special box.

So I worked on it for about a week, and after that week, I actually had an entire alchemy combination system, which I called All-Chemical. I know, I suck at thinking up good names. But anyway, I believe a week later I actually had everything working in a pretty good looking user interface, with the clicking and dragging and stuff.

So at this point my brother came home from work. He takes a look at the computer screen, and said something along the lines of, "It's gonna be sold?" Before I got to answer, he said, "Yeah, it's gonna be sold."

So yeah, basically, you can thank my brother that I now am working on an entire game engine.