cubana

The project is currently being developed.

Cubana is a simple 3D game written from scratch in C with a vulkan renderer. The aim of the game is for the player to escape the labirynth by solving puzzles, avoiding enemies and advancing through the maze.

C has been chosen for its simplicity, fast compile times and ease of debugability. Vulkan has been chosen as a go-to API due to its C-API interface and lack of OpenGL's weirdness. Due to expected low-performance footprint and to keep the code simple, the game is designed to run single-threaded.

One of the main principles standing behind the philosophy of developing cubana is creating all major components from scratch. Hence the usage of external code has been minimised to:

• SDL - used for an OS-layer abstraction
• lua - scripting game logic and interactive debug The reasons are: 1) easier debuggability 2) better control over the performance 3) preference for solutions crafted to the problem at stake and not similar problems and 4) desire for a broad-ranging understanding of how all the components work together to achieve the goal of creating an immersive and fun to engage in virtual 3D-world.

The exception to this rule are tools and third-party libraries used during development process only and are typically used for better debugging experience and won't be used in the final game.

Current state

Before the actual game will begin its development, it is important to lay foundations that will make the development a smooth and pleasureable experience. This includes creation of basic utilities, data structures, memory allocators, debugging tools, platform abstraction layer, I/O handling and others. Currently, the following features are present in the engine:

• Basic cube rendering in arbitrary positions, sizes and colours (using a Vulkan backend)
• Debug UI (thanks to ImGUI and C/lua bindings, currently being reworked)
• In-game script editing and execution with lua
• Basic 3D primitives drawing
• Logging system
• Memory allocators (to be reworked)
• Basic platform abstraction layer
• Keyboard and GamePad input handling
• Basic event system
• Save/Load and Replay systems
• Entity system based on megastruct philosophy (at least for now)
• AABB collision detection
• Simple AABB-based physics engine
• Level loading from .ctm files

Development

In the nearest fututre, I'll be working on:

• Creating a Trigger entity for launching a chosen lua script upon collision
• Creating a Camera following player
• Making lua scripts hot-reloadable
• Preventing whole-program crashes on lua errors

Building

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . -j