My final semester at RPI. Taking a few simple courses, another that I view as a capstone of sorts, a research project and finding a job. Of everything that will be keeping me busy, the research project will have the heaviest weight. While most of my classmates are just doing work for professors, I will be working on something I am excited about.
Last semester I was trying to figure out what I should do for this research requirement. It hit me in the shower, I really like languages, programming languages. I am also enjoy making games. Response? Make a game in multiple languages and analyze the resulting code. Metrics I am interested in is productivity, time to complete an objective, and maintainability, or readability of the code.
The Game
The game I have in mind is fairly simple. Play as a geometric object in an environment of other geometric object or chains. Create explosions, emanating your effluence onto these other objects. Once they have acquired enough effluence they too explode, spreading that effluence for you. After enough of this effluence has spread, you win. Simple, with a feedback loop.
I've already implemented one version as a Java4K competition game, whose turn in date was today (February 28th) (mirror). Though this is not one of my targeted languages for the immediate project, it was interesting to flush out the logic of the game (it helped flush out networking too, though left out of the java4k implementation due to security restrictions on applets). This will allow me to focus more on the systems.
Difficulty
The difficulty (mostly in the aspect of time) in this project will be that I am building all the game related systems (physics and networking are the two systems I am most interested in) in three target languages (C++, Go, Haskell).
I would love to do complete implementations in each language but as time will likely tell, that won't be possible. Parts of systems will be implemented in stages (eg. physics will only support circle collision at first).
This should turn out to be a fun adventure.
