Color Collision & Custom C++ ASCII Engine
March 2022 – April 2022
Engine and Game Programmer, Lead Designer
Development Info
Roles: Engine and Game Programmer, Lead Designer
Team Size: 1 (Engine) 2 (Game)
Development Time: 5 weeks (Engine) 1 week (Game)
Tools Used: C++, SFML, Visual Studio
Created as a class project for IMGD 3000 with Professor Mark Claypool.
Genre: Arcade
Platform: Windows
Project Status: Complete & Downloadable
Color Collision is an arcade-style game where you dodge across rails and match your color with oncoming blocks. Survive as long as possible and try to set the high score across different difficulties.
Extract and Run “Color Collision.exe” to play the full game!
Game Engine Development
During Mark Claypool’s Technical Game Development course, I was able to create a fully featured, text-based game engine from scratch using C++. The engine is based off the Dragonfly Engine, and features an object system with 2D physics, collisions, a full game loop with subscribable events, input management, and a robust error logging system. Objects are also rendered on screen with custom ASCII sprites and animations. This project strengthened my knowledge of C++ and gave me a greater understanding of the many different systems in game engines.
What I learned
- Programming game loops, and creating event systems that allow for custom events and object subscriptions
- Efficient C++ design conventions such as the singleton design pattern
- Building a game world system; scripting and rendering gameobjects with world attributes
- Incorporating the Simple and Fast Multimedia Library (SFML) to display text-based graphics
- Implementing test driven development (TDD) to test game engine functionality
Austin Hyatt 