Plot: The game focuses on Byakuren and the events that led up to her being sealed away. It will explore how she met up with the characters from UFO, and how her quest for eternal youth brought her to Makai.

Cast: Byakuren, Shinki and friends, the UFO cast, and a few surprises!

Length: At the moment we're planning on a 6 stage game with an extra stage.

Engine: I'll be writing a custom engine most likely, if not I'll just grab something else, depends on my availability. If I do write it, it'll be done in C++, and I may possibly incorporate the v8 javascript engine in for things like menus, bullet patterns, characters, etc. All the rendering will be done in C++ for speed. I picked v8 mostly for performance reasons (v8 runs JS that's compiled into bytecode in a VM, so it's pretty fast), and because it's easy to learn (easy to learn in a day or two, and very close to actionscript, which is well known), but I'm open to suggestions, as I haven't read too much about how well Python or Lua would perform, and doing it all in C++ is also an option. It will be cross-platform (Windows/OSX/Linux), but I may need someone to port it to OSX as I don't have a Mac.

What we need atm: Artists, composers for music, and maybe another experienced programmer. I have written some C++ programs several years ago, but nothing this complex, so it may be a good idea for someone to at least look over what I'm doing to make sure I'm doing things in a sane manner.

IRC: irc.ppirc.net #lotusofedification

There hasn't been any commit since the initial commit, and the IRC is dead. Can we declare this project dead yet?

>>4
I've talked to the guy before (privately on IRC) and he is making some progress learning and developing the shooting engine (Blackpyre-Engine). The last update was 2 days ago. Also, remember that he said it would take months to complete a functional engine and well, it hasn't been months yet. Don't lose heart, Anon.

Whoa, I hadn't seen this!
I might be able to help with something

This project isn't dead yet, I'm just waiting until the engine is done before we do any content creation/artist recruitment. The engine is about halfway done at this point, so progress /is/ being made.

Sorry for the lack of updates.

This sounds interesting.
Anything with Shinki is always relevant to my interest.
I'll keep checking back on this thread to see how the engine development is going.

>>8

I'll try to update it as much as possible, but the tendency is that I'll make a bunch of changes and loose track of how much progress I made.

For the more technical people out there, so far the OpenGL rendering bits and object/entity management code is done, which was the biggest hurdle. Entities (which are currently just gray boxes) now render using hardware acceleration. The general structure of it is done, which means that collision detection, audio playback, configuration loading/saving, input handling (I'll probably add gamepad support if I can get my hands on one), and sprite/texture loading can now be implemented with relative ease. Then of course there's the last part, which is integrating it with v8, which is just a matter of exposing certain classes to a javascript runtime. It sounds like more work than it actually is, since there are plenty of online resources/libraries that make writing this code easy.

Then once the engine code is done, there'll be a framework written in javascript that will simplify things like making menus, laying out a score screen, showing a loading indicator, programming stages, etc. We can probably start working on the content once this part is reached, since coming up with dialogue, bullet patterns, art, etc. will take some time.

I also need people who can help me port/test this to/on other platforms, mainly Windows XP/Vista/7 and the several varieties of OSX. That can come later though, since the engine will frequently be in a broken state until it's finished.

A lot of this information should be on the wiki, if not then it'll be documented once I'm done. I'm writing it so that it can be used to make other shooting games, so I'm definitely going to document it throughly.

I just realized I wrote a giant wall of text, so I'll stop writing until I make more progress.

Well, I'm happy to announce that one of the major parts of the engine, the scripting module, is nearly finished. This was the centerpiece of the engine, and the completion of this marks a huge accomplishment in the projects progress toward completion (it was also the source of several migraines).

For anyone reading this who knows Javascript/Actionscript, you can now spawn entities in the engine like this, using Javascript:

for(var i=0; i<360; i+=45){
    print("Making entity at angle "+i);
    var f = new Entity(300, 200, 100, 100, i, "bullet.png"); // creates a new entity at (300, 200) with a width of 100 and a height of 100, with the texture "bullet.png"
    if(i==0) setTimeout(function(){ f.destroy(); }, 4000); // destroys the first entity spawned after 4 seconds
}

The ability to specify how the bullet moves over time still needs to be implemented, but it's not that hard compared to just getting that bit of code to run.

What needs to be worked on still are things like collision detection/hitboxes, input, and sound output. the rendering cycle may need to be optimized a bit if necessary. Good progress is being made though.

The engine will work on Windows and Linux, but someone would need to port it to OSX for me, as I don't have an apple computer (but since it runs on Linux, it shouldn't be terribly hard to do if you know what you're doing).

Thanks again for all of you who are supporting the project!

Oh, might as well attach a screenshot of what's done so far. Nothing exciting quite yet, but it works. (There's movement code specified in the C++ parts, so those bullets spiral out based on their initial angle specified in the Javascript)

More scripting goodness. Now, the animation is specified in Javascript. Here's the code that generates that:

https://github.com/psychcf/Blackpyre-Engine/blob/90327f8dd79b0a0befc4c3c92b2c2740ab8da0e7/data/game/main.js

I'm going to start moving onto another part of the code now, the rendering stuff could use some optimizations, but it works, so I'm not going to sweat it just yet.

So what's left is sound, input, and hitboxes. I guess I'll work on input next, it's a good balance between being easy to code and being useful.

Just figured I'd post an update for this project, since it's been a while since the last update.

The engine source has moved to here: https://github.com/hflw/Blackpyre-Engine

The engine is close to being finished, but schoolwork and such has slowed it's completion. That said, it will definitely be finished before the end of the summer.

I'm really looking forward to having the engine done so that I can actually do something with it.

Input in the engine is now working. Next up is sound and collision detection.

Here's a video of input working: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwLRxsbsvrY

here's the script that the engine is running in that video: https://github.com/hflw/Blackpyre-Engine/blob/c252bde15640d55f288d93604bde5b824b468b1d/data/game/main.js