Frenzy, Part 1

2023/07/22

Throughout university, I dabbled with game development. I started out using a Java-like language called Processing, because it had good tutorials and a very easy to learn API.

Using Processing, I made a handful of apps that showcased what I had learned about game development.

I made an “ecosystem” of frogs, mosquitoes and fruit trees that gradually evolved the frogs and mosquitoes to consume more of their prey before dying. This app was very object-oriented, and was one of my first big projects after learning about objects in Java 100.

I also created another evolutionary sort of system, this time with procedurally generated terrain and vehicles in 2D. The app generated cars from random polygons with wheels attached to vertices. You could mutate a car at any time to create a slightly modified version, to see if it fared any better on a random track. I used Box2D for the physics.

I would go on to create other projects in Processing, including procedurally generated dungeons, but I wanted to learn a proper game engine. At the time, my poor refurbished Thinkpad was not really capable of running Unity, so making a 3D game was out of the question. In 2019, Godot was starting to become a proper game engine, and I heard it handled 2D well and had a Python-like syntax. I downloaded it and gave it a try. I created a few random apps, and some more complex things like a roguelike platformer.

After graduating, I wondered what I wanted to do in my spare time. I had always wanted to do more with game dev, and since having completed my degree, I had a lot of ideas thanks to my game dev courses and computer graphics especially. I finished reading Frank Herbert’s Dune and started thinking that it would be cool to play a game as a sandworm, where you awaken after some long period underground to the modern world, to a complete hostile environement, and use your cool sandworm abilities to wreak havoc and try to find some semblance of the past.

That’s roughly how the idea for Frenzy came about. It was inspired by games like Hotline Miami and Nuclear Throne. The first work on Frenzy was to get a sandworm moving around. This took a long time to get it to both feel right and work with the physics engine. I started with an open implementation for the node movement and adapted the physics to my needs. The worm is pretty much a chain of KinematicNode2D that follow the head. The worm’s name is actually Gaia - like the Mother of Titans.

After Gaia’s movement was implemented, I created some enemies to fight. I had never written AI before, and it ended up needing a few behaviours. The AI pathfinds using a vector of rays to detect walls, along with a mesh of nodes along the level that it uses the A* algorithm to navigate. The enemies also have a state machine that modifies their movement behaviours. They can seek, run away, chase, patrol, and other such behaviours.

One of my favourite parts of the development was creating the art and assets. I had recently taken computer graphics, so I knew I wanted to use 3D models if I could, since I wanted to play with Blender, and use normal maps to perform lighting. Each sprite in the game is a top-rendered 3D model. All the animations are hand animated in Blender. The sprite sheets is rendered twice, once with the normal texture and a second time with a normal map. In game, the characters use an AnimationPlayer and and Sprite to control their animation.

For now, that’s all I’ll say about the project. I’ll get more into it in future blog posts that link from this page.