Dash and the Indigo Engine
What Giant Squid says is true. There's a new game coming out very soon, and it's called Dash. Here's the rundown of what it's like.
Dash is a quick replay game. It's the kind of game that has limited story, but infinite fun value. Ever played temple run? The kind of game that's always the same, but always fun. Dash is a game about starting in the center, and working your way out, in whatever direction you can. When you start the round, that may seem easy enough: You're simply standing on a platform made of colored blocks. Oh, and here's a doozy for Cosine Gaming: It's a 3D platform. And you can move the mouse. To look around. (Ahem, I'm speaking to you, Circle Wars, with your bloody attacks against the mouse pointer!) But as you step onto one of those colored blocks, all the other blocks of the same color move up, preventing you from walking on them. As you continue, more of those colors pop up, until you've hit every color. It's at this point that they all go down again. This cycle is addicting within each round, and getting out is surprisingly hard. Not to mention you can't touch a cube for too long and if you misstep, you might end up stuck with walls all around you.
I actually came up with the idea for Dash while I was bored. I was playing with a tablecloth with different colored dots on it. My goal was the same as the goal of dash. If you you can keep up to date with new games like dash, check both the Beta Projects page and this blog.
You might be surprised why there hasn't been a lot of hype for Dash all this time, and why it's not on the Beta projects page. That's because I've only started making it recently. Then how will it be out soon? This game will not take too long to make. The reason why? The Indigo Engine. And that brings us to the second part of this entry.
This part is more directed to those of you with some technical knowledge in programming or 3D design. The Indigo Engine has been being developed for a fairly long time now. It's Cosine Gaming's Hello to the world of three dimensions. And in true Cosine Gaming nature, it's kind of crappy. It began development for Code Indigo (I wonder if there is a connection in the name there!), which if you haven't heard about I strongly recommend you get excited about. It's gonna be crazy awesome. (But it's going to be a while until that comes out, the Indigo Engine is barely complete enough even to make a rapid replay game like Dash.) And the best thing about the Indigo Engine? It's free. So totally free it leaves other freeness in the dark. It's so free it doesn't even have a license. You can take it and sell it if you want. (But I'm going to assume no one would buy it.) It's going to allow Cosine Gaming to come out with a lot more 3D games a lot more quickly. Oh, and if you want to download it, go to the Code Indigo GitHub repository and download it. Then it's located in the CodeIndigo/Indigo directory.
Here's a technical rundown of the Indigo Engine. It's written entirely in C++, and uses OpenGL with Glut. If you haven't heard of those, they're very cool and I recommend checking them out. Currently it uses a very old version which is easier to use, but I hope to change that later. We'll see about that. The Indigo Engine is definitely not currently finished; it needs a lot of work. But here's what it currently can do. Create a window and add callbacks for mouse motion and updates, for example. Also check whether keys are down or have been just pressed. Load meshes from an Obj file, or create geometric ones like a cube or a sphere. Add those to an object which has an automatic callback for updates, give it a position (dynamic), and add that to the world so it'll be rendered. Place animations on meshes, objects, or other variables. Texture a mesh given a bitmap. All of this with just a line of code each. The Indigo Engine is nothing if not easy to use and simple to understand. I'm super excited to get to start seeing it work. Think about it, the current Dash version for the entire 3D game is barely 150 lines. Whereas simple 2D games like Sniper in my collection exceed 600!
I hope you're interest is now perked in the Indigo Engine and in Dash, and I'm excited to give you further information. Remember, you can keep up to date with new games via both the Beta Projects page and this blog.