Dash is a top-down tank-based combat game, based on the
Tanks! minigame from
Wii Play. It's
written in C++,
using CMake and
SFML. I implemented my own collision
and pathfinding logic.
In Dash, the player must fight enemy tanks in a series of missions,
where each mission has a unique map, and more difficult enemy tanks are
introduced as the missions progress. The game ends if the player
completes all twenty missions or loses all their lives. Points are
earned for destroying enemy tanks, and high scores are tracked in a
persistant leaderboard.
The mission layouts are loaded from data files on disk, where the layout
itself is 'drawn' using ASCII characters. This provides an intuitive
authoring process, making it easy to create and modify missions. The
rendering logic is fully responsive, allowing the game to be played at
any resolution.
Design
Before I began programming, I wrote several paragraphs detailing each
aspect of the game, including game mechanics, user interactions, and AI
behaviours. From these paragraphs, I derived a series of classes that
would satisfy the requirements, illustrating their relationships in a
class diagram. This allowed me to refine the structure of the program
before I'd written any code, reducing the need to refactor it after it
was written.
Implementation
Interestingly, for this project, I spent a significant amount of time
learning CMake, which proved somewhat
challenging due to a lack of documentation. However, I was still able to
construct a configuration that provides dependency management, code
formatting, resource bundling, and unit testing. This process was made
easier by my prior experience with similar tools in web projects.
For the game itself, I implemented my own version of the
A* pathfinding algorithm, which allowed me to create enemy tanks that could react to changes in
the mission layout as walls were destroyed. This process helped
reinforce my knowledge of data structures and the logic behind efficient
search algorithms.
