Tron Warp

So after a long time of not developing anything at home, I have finally set up everything again for C++ development with OpenGL, and it is all because of updating to Windows 11 (to be fair I am a bit bored at work so that contributes a bit too). Since I now not only have all the Linux tools available in Windows, but can also run graphical applications, it is very exciting.

I had a few abandoned projects, but I think I am going to go forward with TronWarp (name to be improved…), which is a remake with improvements on a silly game I made for a quick ludum dare jam back in 2014 or so. It was basically a crossbreed of Hexagon and G-switch, you race motorcycles through an octogonal tunnel avoiding the missing tiles, and you can jump over to the opposite side of the tunnel at any point. It featured crazy graphics (the floor would smoothly change colour every frame) and it was mostly in 2D, doing the calculations for the tunnel in the CPU and then just drawing the triangles myself rather than uploading models to the GPU.

Now, because part of me weants to do some creative OpenGL shader coding rather than doing it in an engine such as Godot ( I know I know, deprecated, old and useless, kind of want to do it anyway) I am moving the whole thing to 3D, with a retro look. Maybe I will even implement a CRT filter, who knows. I also want to beef up the gameplay, giving the ships that race through the tunnel some kind of power so that they can push other racers off the track. However, the main design constraint is the fact that I want 4 players and I want them to be able to play on a single keyboard, which was a feature of the original Warp, so the control scheme is going to be a bit tricky.