dodgey ball devlog 0

So here I am. Starting a devlog partway through a project.

20/10/2021

The Project

Intention is to make a fun fast-paced multiplayer game, akin to Sports Heads and games of that ilk. Except it's based on dodgeball rules, and played in 3D space.

So far...

GameObject

Let's make a box! With the physics variables from the wonderful Nature of Code, I made the base class for everything in-game to inherit from...

Sphere

... and immediately wrote a class that overrides most of that base class. But now we have round. And it's all in 3D, not that I can render that yet.

The third dimension

I used to write my own vector functions but thought that it'd be wasteful rewriting them all for another dimension. Enter gl-matrix, with more functionality than I need right now, but the capabilities it seems to have should be useful later down the line.

So there's a 3D vector library. But how on earth do I show 3D space on a 2D canvas? God I hope I don't need to think with cameras...

Thinking with cameras

Quick google search. Pretty example. Checking the code... Okay yeah we're doing projection, let's make that camera.

Initially I made a Camera object per GameObject. Which worked, but in hindsight wasn't the simplest. After moving the Camera out to the main Game class things started flowing. Stuff was being projected into a space correctly! Add a sprinkle of z-sorting and there it is, '3D'.

A player approaches...

So we have 3D balls and boxes. Done, ship it, game's mint.

Nah. We need a player, and my intention is to have them controlled by a gamepad. Hope that API is easy. Google, MDN, aaaaand yeah it's easy enough! Throw the controller axis variables at the Player's force vectors and... Nope. Swap the Y and Z though, and we can move about on our 3D floor. Wew.

Target reticle, throw ball button, pickup ball button, sprint button, all easy enough!

And now add some collision and...

and...

AND...

Ok. We can work with that.

So yeah that's where I'm at. Cya.