Widescreen Gaming Forum

Geometry Genocide

This is the game that I and a team of five others created to graduate from college. Other outside people developed assets including the music and textures (available in the credits). It is a 3D arcade-style shooter akin to Geometry Wars, in which you play an armored sphere against hordes of other geometrical objects, including an icosahedron that rolls around and spawns other enemies based on the number rolled. It includes powerups that can be upgraded with your points and cycled through. It also has achievements ...and the screen behavior is Horizontal+!

I was the QA Engineer and I also developed and implemented the collision system, traps system, game state machine, and helped code the shaders. I used a binary tree to keep track of all collideable objects and used a new (for that time) algorithm for tracking fast moving objects between frames. The development cycle was a total of five months: one month design, one month asset production/pre-planning, and three months implementation. We set our own schedules to work by (ours was 08:30-18:30 M-F), including rules and regulations to follow. For example, if anyone was more than 15 minutes late, they had to buy everyone breakfast the following morning. More than 30 minutes late and you were written up and reported to the producer.

Unfortunately we had to develop the game to run on outdated hardware and are development computers were desktop replacements. It runs great on my desktop: I recommend AFR if you have a SLI system. We only tested on the target machine and our laptop, so multiscreen was never tested. I would love to see if any of you guys are able to run it with multiple monitors, though. Keep in mind that the gameplay board is a fixed size, so it won't add anything to the experience. That and the HUD is programmed to be at the corners of the screen, but the HUD does scale with the resolution.

Alas there are some bugs and still a minor DirectX memory leak. There was a bugfix completed, but it was never uploaded and I haven't been in contact with my teammates in more than a year. I'm still impressed by what we accomplished, and it is a lot of fun to play. Our final grade was 96%(A-) if anyone is interested.

Pretty fun game.

It works in xfire (actually can see some scaling, not that it matters). It works in triple wide 5760x1080!

The xbox360 controller works, but the upgrades menu isn't visible for some reason. This happens both on single and 3 monitors.

Some shots:

We never had a problem with the upgrade menu not appearing. Our project lead had members of his WoW clan test the game and this never came up. Is this only a problem with the controller or is it a display problem? I wasn't involved directly with the menu system so I don't know what I'm looking at when staring at the code. It might be a problem with ATi's drivers since they often deprecate older functions, and the game is using the December 2007 DirectX SDK. The menus attached to the player are alpha-blended billboards. I wonder if there is some sort of floating-point precision being lost because the rotation matrix sets the view really close to 90 degrees. If it's at 90 degrees then things disappear.

Anyway, that's pretty sweet that it's working in Eyefinity. Just goes to show that if the perspective is properly coded, you don't need to do anything extra to get it working on a basic level.

Oh, and I just played it the other night trying out the different SLI modes. Every one of them gave some hitching unfortunately, but it really isn't needed in this game anyway. I'd like to play around and see if I could get PhysX working 8) .

Wasn't clear enough in my post, but the upgrade menu not appearing is only an issue when the xbox360 controller is selected as the input device. It works fine with KB/M mode.