Adrenaline - Computer Graphics Project

This is Adrenaline, a game created by me for my Computer Graphics Programming class final. This was done in a couple of weeks (most of the programming itself in a single week).

Technical Information--
This was programmed in C++, an engine (such as Unity or the UDK) was not used. The only things used were FMOD and DirectX 9. Shaders were used to render the 3D in the scene. The resources and the music engine behind the game were completed/gathered (for the most part) a couple weeks in advance, but most everything else was done in the week before the project being due.

Gameplay--
The game is a music based game, most comparable to Beat Hazard- the more intense the song you are playing (you can see the intensity level in the top right corner), the more enemies that will spawn. The more enemies that spawn the more power-ups you can get, the more points you can get, etc. The music is user supplied, it doesn't use a browser (mostly due to time constraints), but does scan a folder and list all the files in it for selection.

The goals of the game is to survive until the end of the song you are playing. The bar located at the bottom of the screen is your adrenaline level. Your adrenaline constantly falls, and getting hit also drops your adrenaline. If you run out of adrenaline and get hit you die (you can't die from the constant slow drain from the adrenaline- but in this case getting hit would kill you instantly). Killing enemies is the only way to increase you adrenaline.

Power-ups all look similar on the ground, but you can differentiate what they are once you pick them up by the icons in the bottom left corner.
Red prevents your adrenaline dropping for any reason.
Yellow gives you a faster rate of fire.
Blue slows down enemy movement and increases the length between enemy waves (similar to some kind of 'bullet time')
Purple causes you to deal double damage.
Green increases the player's movement speed.

Also, to point it out, as you gain adrenaline, the red overlay on the screen gets larger and more visible- this overlay also pulses to intense parts of the music. The volume of the music also scales (slightly) to the level of your adrenaline (max adrenaline = 100%, 0 adrenaline = 70% volume (at max volume in the options)).

Issues--
There are a couple issues with the game. The biggest one is that the reticle doesn't aim the player exactly where he's shooting (I aim the player based off the cursor's position from the center of the screen- in retrospect this doesn't work because my camera is angled down on the scene, thus I should have used picking). Also, the animations on the models aren't perfect (notably the player always walks forward), this is due to the fact that I'm not an animator and the models I'm using didn't come with strafing, etc, animations (anyone who has played Fallout would understand why). Lastly, the bullets (especially when walking), don't originate from the end of the gun, this was partly because of the animation and partly because I couldn't find a good bone in the gun to translate the bullet's start position from.

Credits--
In order to give credit where credit is due (and you can see this in the in game credits) the 3D assets are all from Van Buren (Interplay's canceled Fallout 3) as is some of the 2D elements. I created some of the 2D graphics myself, such as the HUD, but nothing particularly special.

The songs used in the video are all from OCRemix, but again, anything can be used as it's user supplied. The songs that play in the video can be identified by the tag information that is displayed at the top of the screen.

Final Notes--
The video doesn't start from the very beginning (there is a small intro video and loading screen) because FRAPs doesn't capture one of the HUD elements when the game is in windowed mode (no idea why, it baffles me, it captures sprites that render before and after it). And switching to fullscreen while recording with FRAPs seems to crash the game.

TL;DR- Not all the content (mostly the 3D graphics) were created by me, but I made most of this in a couple weeks for a computer graphics programming class's course project. It has it's issues but works nicely.

• Category

  Gaming

[Sharpless512]

awesome