New Project: BubbleGrow

In game screenshot

A couple weeks ago I decided to do one more project before going back to developing my other game. From the above screenshot, you can see a preview of the game, titled "BubbleGrow". The basic idea is that you collect resources (green bubbles), purchase and upgrade your bubbles, travel around the map, and fight other players (such as you (red) fighting the computer (teal) in the above screenshot). The arrow indicators on the edges of the window show where other players are.

The goal for this game isn't so much being fun or for selling, but as a free and open-source project for learning. I've been using GitHub for revision control. I've kept the external dependencies to a minimum (only SFML at this point) and licensed everything (including the artwork I made) under the MIT license, so that anyone can use anything from this project for whatever they wish.

Mock-up main menu (only Quick Match games are currently supported)

The game is structured in a simple manner, is well commented, and is designed to be easy to dive into. To break it down quickly, there exists a "World" class that holds all players, a "Player" class that holds the state of each player, and a "Unit" class that holds the state of each bubble. There is a single subclass ("Resources") that is a specialization of the "Player" class in that it handles those green resource bubbles that the players can mine for purchasing units. The only other class is a "Renderer" class that handles the display and input. I plan to expand the "Renderer" class since it's approaching over 500 lines of code and has way too much scope. A few additional classes are needed to handle sound and batch drawing.

As a learning resource (which is the whole point of making this open source) I hope this project allows people the chance to learn how to download and setup a build environment for a medium sized project. I plan to heavily document instructions for new programmers to be able to build and modify the game. As of now, all that's needed to build BubbleGrow are the library and include files downloaded from the SFML website, CMake, Make.exe, and MinGW.

The different bubble types you can purchase and upgrade to

Additionally, with the way the program is structured, it should be easier for newer programmers to dive right in and start changing things. The entire game state is focused around 3 major functions, "Update" which updates the unit's health and other stats, "MakeDecision", where each unit has a view of the game state and submits a Request for processing, and "ProcessRequest", where the Unit executes either its current action (such as finishing an attack) or starts a new action based on the Request (decision) it just made.

Finally, as a bonus, this game supports multithreading using OpenMP, which is awesome because it is both cross-platform and compiler safe (since OpenMP uses pragma compiler directives which will simply be ignored if not supported) and because this is accomplished without using any threading libraries. While it would have been nice to use a concurrent container from a library like Threading Building Blocks, by following certain rules (such as only calling const methods on containers that don't modify the internal state of the container) and setting only a few variables to atomic, thread-safety is maintained.

Anyways, progress is rapidly underway and I hope to finish it in the next couple weeks. It's certainly a fun personal project and hopefully will be helpful to others!