Alpha release - v0.7

Hello everyone,

I proudly present the first public version of my own game!

Versioning

The current version is v0.7, because I had hit 6 milestones in the past privately, but don’t go looking for those versions, because they are not available on the internet. You didn’t miss out on much, I didn’t release those because the game wasn’t really a “game” until now. Previous milestones included:

• creating the menu system,
• adding custom-made animations,
• adding sound effects.

The current version is playable (even if short as of now) as a game. You can read about the implemented and the planned features on the page of the project, I am planning to add a lot more interesting things like local co-op, and more levels with more varied enemies.

Known issue acknowledgement

There’s a known issue in this version about weird-behaving sound effect, and there’s also an extra installation step to get the right codecs on Windows. I do not wish to have any of these in my game, and I am soon starting work to integrate a new library to replace Qt’s built-in one. Qt’s built-in one is simply not designed to work well in a game, and be portable. I have already selected the right library which is better fit for this purpose, I didn’t integrate it already into the game because it will take a bit longer, and I didn’t want to delay this release any further (I originally planned this release 2 months ago).

Tech details for those interested:

This game is built on the Qt framework, written in C++. I design & write the code myself, apart from:

• the framework features (OS communication, and window creation),
• the GoogleTest framework,
• a couple functions from Boost.

Excluding those libraries, the project is currently ~24k lines of code, and ~20k lines of tests.

The game runs blazingly fast (600-1000 fps) using mostly a single CPU core, and no GPU acceleration. A game without GPU acceleration, you ask? Yes. I ran trials experimenting with GPU acceleration before, but the cost was higher than the gain because the objects in the game are small and simple. I will keep evaluating GPU support in later versions, and see if it helps the performance, or hurts it.