Tidstomten (translates into something like The Gnome of Time) is a game made for a course I took in 2013 at Blekinge Institute of Technology called Small Game Project. It ran for ten weeks at half-speed and the objective was simply to form a group, come up with a small scale game idea and then implement it. The group I was part of consisted of seven group members: Anders Krüger (me), Christian Ljungberg, Marcus Svensson, Niklas Nermansson, Pontus Nilsson, Sofie Höglund, and Kim Kristiansson Stenberg.
Game Description
Tidstomten is a third person puzzle game featuring the ability to record multiple timelines in order to solve puzzles. The player takes on the role of a santa who co-operates with himself by traveling in time.
My Contribution
My primarily contribution to this project was the Renderer and the system for building and loading new levels.
Deferred Renderer
The Deferred rendering is made as a three step pipeline. The first step work as a very simple forward render, but instead of rendering directly to the screen it stores the information in two rendertargets and a depthstencil. In the second step we do all the light and shadow calculations as well as generating a screen space ambient occlusion (SSAO).
I am very proud of how the rendering works and is implemented. However, late design decisions in the class diagram made so that the structure could be improved further. But unfortunately, these changes occurred so late in the project that we had no time to further improve the renderer.
Level Loader
Loading a level is done by specifying a folder where all files for the level are. The level consist of three .png files, where each pixel position in the image is representing a position in the game world’s XZ-plane.
I am quite pleased with the Level Loader. But if we had had more time I would have created a real level editor. In the end it was really frustrating to change color values in PNG-files to make a level, and it made it difficult to create fun and challenging levels.