Bouncing Beach Balls

Bouncing Beach Balls
Bouncing Beach Balls is the start of a game project.

As part of this project I have added some features for the Dx9Ice game engine for the upcomming version http://gamedev.digiapp.com
* Toggle Full Screen - in game
* Full Screen with borders - keeping your game in the original resolution
* Automatic Window resize and centering
* IceAnimation - a new interface for easy / automatic sprite animation handling
* TextType feature in IceFont. Nice for "Dating Sims" or text adventures or just a cool menu.
* Smooth bilinear filtering for Fonts and Sprites (or not-you decide)

One of the goals with Bouncing Beach Balls (beyond making a fun game) is to make it look good both on
regular 4:3 monitors (800x600 and 1024x768) and widescreen 5:3 / 8:5 monitors (1280x768 / 1280x800 up) and at the same time be able to run on Netbooks with 1024x600.

All internal game logic and graphics will be designed in 960x600 and the various monitors will be supported with different options Aspect correct Scaling or borders around a centered screen

This screenshot is from today's dev session:
http://gamedev.digiapp.com/project/BeachBallBounce.jpg

If anyone has experience and suggestions for making games that allow the game logic to run in a fixed format but at the same time support a larger range of monitors - please let me know

Other comments are also welcome - as always :)

Still in progress ... :)
I defined the basic rules for the game and am now able to move the "player".

I took a short detour - creating a small animation test application to preview animations
The animation tool can grid cut a texture with the animation. Preview it and also generate a single line of code with the coordinates for the animation so its easy to paste into the game scene.

I also added a few generic features:
a) DrawFilledTriangle .. and one more that has transparency and texture
b) Shadow for sprites. (enabled or disabled)
c) Global shadow parameters are offsetX, offsetY, shadowgrey (how black is the shadow color) and shadowDepth ( how much larger is the sprites shadow compared to the sprite itself )
d) Shadow feature works with all other sprite features including "robots" and animations

Im quite happy with the Shadow feature - its easy to use - just a single line of code (and a property on the sprites that wants to have shadow) :thumb:

ehhh .. well the original idea for the game play rules turned out to be.. eh.. well boring and difficult to play.

I got the Physics engine running and a huge amount of beach balls are now bouncing around and into each other .. that part looks great so now im looking at perhaps changing this into a "Filler" type of game .. while i try to sort this out i have been doing some more updates to the game engine itself.