TLDR; 

He's making a computer game and there is a pixel art johnson halfway down the page... He doesn't seem happy about it.

Hello Steemit!

This is the first in a series of blogs following my current game project Expense, also my first ever blog.

What's it all about?

As you probably guessed from the title it's a sandbox trading game that's set in space in the moderately distant future.  Buy ships, sell goods. Set up automated trade routes to make you some credits while your war ships are out hunting down Pirates or Aliens or Pirate Aliens.  Build factories and mines on planets to harvest resources to supply your industry.

I took a lot of inspiration from games like Freelancer, The X Series, Patrician III and Open TTD in the planning stages.  I also decided early on that it should be very moddable like Factorio, Kerbal Space Program and of course Minecraft, to help with this I decided to make built in tools for modders to help them along.

It all started with a gimp...

GIMP is an image manipulation program like Photoshop but open source, not to be confused with G.I.M.P.S the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. Those mathematicians are doing stellar work finding super massive prime numbers for everyone to enjoy.

Anyway, I suck at using GIMP.  What I wanted was something simpler that anyone (even me) could use to create content for my game, something easy like paint that could load and modify any asset that's already in the game for making texture packs and make new images for new content.

You're probably wondering why I haven't shown a picture of the editor yet and that is a fair point well made, I haven't posted an image yet and I have an explanation as to why ready.  When I explained to my girlfriend this feature that you can edit the images to whatever you want she said to me 

                        "But won't most people just draw penises?"

I mean really!  You try hard to make something to help people create and that is the first place that they go. :(

So here it is Steemit, the first ever captured screenshot from my game and it's this...  I hate it.

I think the black lines are supposed to be missile exhausts or something.

One thing other than the penis that's interesting about this picture is that all the images for the buttons and windows were made by the program, that's pretty fun I can tell you, building a tool then using it to make itself prettier. :)

Did you say windows?

Yes I did, thank you for following up on that.  I wanted a full window manager from the start as most trading games benefit from having a few screens with charts dotted about the place and I loved the GUI from Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, lots of little windows with cameras focused on my trains gives me total control of how I like the game screen to look not how someone else thinks it should be.

While Love2d is a pretty bare bones framework, there are a lot of very good GUI libraries available on the forums but I decided to be an idiot and write my own.  I cannot express how much fun I had doing this (Nerd).   I do regret it in hindsight as it took a while to get everything acting just like you'd expect it to and I still spend too much time tinkering with it.

The windows themselves are pretty basic objects, anything put into the window inherits a pointer to it's host window blah blah, boring stuff.  I only mention it because for the game objects I opted for an Entity Component System. to avoid some of the pitfalls of inheritance and make it much easier to modify...  More next time. :)

Wait, that's it?

Well I think that will cover part 1, not so much a game launch more of a directed ramble about a program that I'm writing.  I hope you enjoyed reading it, I've never blogged before but I enjoyed the experience and I'm pretty far into this project so I'll probably be writing more about it.

I don't really know how technical people would like me to get about this really, I intend this blog to be an interesting read for anyone interested in games and what goes into making them so I opted for no code in this article.  That being said, this is a crypto website and I understand a lot of people here are pretty tech savvy.

If you do have any questions about the code or otherwise please leave a comment below, I'd love nothing more than to talk your ear off about this topic.

Next time: Engine building and ECS FTW!