Plan for Tom Bampton

An impromptu GID, and a pretty funny game in 11 hours

It all started innocently enough. James and I were having a discussion on tea, as is often the case on IRC. I joked about sending him the blender model for the cuppa I made a few GIDs back when Plan A went badly wrong. A few minutes later, Craig pipes in that he's just modeled a cuppa and posts a screenshot.

Then I chirp in "I've been meaning to make a game based on tea for ages." A couple more minutes of banter pass and it's decided...

You're a programmer Orc in desperate need of tea. Your pesky artist has decided you've had enough tea and has hidden all the ingredients and utensils you need to make the tea in the Orc village. You've got to find them and make a cuppa before ... well, lets hope we don't have to go there.

By this time it was 13:37 and we had just started working when we noticed the time and took a breather to laugh at the coincidence.

When we'd stopped laughing, we made a 3D run-around-collecting-things-and-solving-puzzles game written in TGE. Theres me, on code, Craig Fortune on models, and Nauris Krauze on 2D art.

The art went really smoothly. Nauris and Craig had all the art done within 6 hours. The code overran up to 11 hours to the state it's in now. This was partly due to me getting a splitting headache and partly due to my computer being so damn slow that in total at least an hour and a half was wasted just waiting for VC++ to finish building TGE.

All of the code was written within very heavy time restraints, and thus is one giant hack job. If I had to do it all again, I'd do it very differently.

Most of the game was done with script. I hacked up the inventory system and made a simple GUI for displaying what's in your inventory, artwork courtesy of Nauris.

Whilst there is not much in the way of C++ changes, what little there is is an even bigger hack job then the script. I tore apart GuiCrossHairHud.cc to implement a fairly nifty system for using objects. Basically, when you look at an object you can use it changes the crosshair to a tick icon to show you can use it. It can also display an alternative bitmap if you cant use the object, but I commented that out for the game. To implement usable objects, I just added a usable field to the ItemData datablock and some script that hooks into the inventory system to call the onUse() method of the datablock .when an object is used (left mouse button). The new GuiCrossHairHud also sports a new console method to obtain the ID of the item currently being looked at.

The effect of using objects was done by dynamically spawning items, particle emitters, etc in the onUse() method of various datablocks.

Here's some random screenies ...






At the 11 hour mark, we stand with a game that contains pretty much everything it needs to contain to complete it. Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I could get all the objects actions in. You can get as far as putting the tea bag in the boiling kettle, but after that theres nothing to do. All the objects are in, however, and can all be found. Some of them are pretty well hidden, some aren't. I'm pretty chuffed with how far we got with so little time, and this has been the most fun impromptu GID since the first one. I plan on coming back to the Cuppa game to finish it off as soon as I have time.