Game4: Choice-Based Game

In Game4 you face your largest challenge so far: using libraries with no starter code.

Your goal is to start with a fork of the game4 base code and develop a choice-based new game which shapes text using harfbuzz, renders glyphs with freetype, and draws the result with OpenGL.

This is a tall order, so let me clarify a few things:

A choice-based game is a plot-heavy game that depends on discrete player choices (rather than continuous motions or actions) to drive the narrative. This genre includes visual novels [like Analogue: A Hate Story], choose-your-own-adventure games [like Howling Dogs], or interactive fiction [like Counterfeit Monkey]. This sort of game often includes a whole lot of text and lasts hours, but you only need to make something with a few choices that lasts 2-5 minutes.

The main technical challenge of this game is going to be getting harfbuzz and freetype working in your asset pipeline. You may choose to integrate them into your game runtime in order to support dynamic text, or use them in your asset pipeline to re-render text into some other format. This goes against a lot of what I say in this class, but: even though I am only asking you to make a short game, you should build your text rendering in such a way that it would scale to a game with hundreds or thousands of lines of text. E.g., you could build a runtime that creates lines of text on-the-fly in-game, or a runtime that pre-renders small files describing glyph positions and textures. Pre-rendering every line to its own texture is not a suitable solution.

Last time I did this myself, I found this harfbuzz example and the freetype tutorial were both valuable resources (as were the example programs that ship with each library, and their header files and documentation). And, hey, I was able to find these links really quickly because I cited them in my source code.

What You Need To Do

• [1pt] Tell me what you are making (due before class, Thursday, October 1st) -- use this google form.
• [2pt] Turn in what you made (due before class, Thursday, October 8th, turn in a working game by Tuesday, October 6th for 0.25pts of extra credit) -- use this google form.

How To Do It

The challenge of this assignment is understanding two new and complex libraries and integrating them with the game code.

1. Update your nest-libs package to v0.6 (v0.5 was missing some headers).
2. Fork the base4 code as a starting point.
3. Fill in the missing sections in README.md to document your project; replace screenshot.png with a screenshot of your game. (The base code is already set up to capture a screenshot whenever you press the PrintScreen key.)
4. Turn in the game using the form linked above.

The official inspirational song of game4 is the first 2:22 of "Green Typewriters" by The Olivia Tremor Control.