Work has officially begun on ScriptTD v2, which will be available for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. Part of the goal this time is to demonstrate cross platform development, as well as hybrid applications that use both C++ and C#.

Alongside my work on this, I plan to write a series of posts as I go, discussing my thoughts on decisions made, or unmade. Think of it like a coding journal, as I may backtrack on decisions or change ideas as I explore them. This should also help provide an insight into the code for people who are interested in playing around with it once it is made public, as well as a nice way for me to get answers when I ask myself ”What on earth were you doing?” in a years time.

Design Goals

To kick things off I’ll outline the goals as they currently stand, and my thoughts on each one.

Cross Platform

ScriptTD needs to support both the phone and Windows in future versions, and with the recent changes in Windows Phone 8, this has become really easy to do. Previously the game was written with XNA, which allowed for great platform flexibility, however it locked me into the XNA libraries and I can’t use those for Windows 8 development. Using WinRT components and PCL, I’ll be able to achieve this goal on both of these modern platforms. The unfortunate cost here is that I cannot bring these features back to Windows Phone 7[.5], so you may ask why I don’t use something like MonoGame along with XNA for Windows Phone 7?

Existing Libraries

I want to take advantage of some great libraries out there that have been created for game development, while allowing myself to be in control of the performance on lower end hardware. For this, I want to use C++ so that I can do native development for the core engine. The side benefit is that I can also use existing libraries for physics and maybe even pathfinding, to help speed up development.

Using C++/CX, I can bind the engine to gameplay code written in C#, which allows me to gain the benefits of C# for gameplay code, while keeping the bits that require higher performance in the native realm.

Animations

One of the missing features from the original ScriptTD was animated sprites. This was a rather large oversight that wasn’t formally resolved, but will be covered by v2. I also want to look at ways to allow objects to have moving parts that are animated “procedurally” so they can look at or target other objects or positions.

Better Entity/Object System

Another big goal is to use an entity system that allows for easy expansion in future, as well as one that lets me bind objects together in a data driven manner if desired.

Zooming/Multiple Resolutions

In moving to Windows 8, we need to support different screen resolutions and DPI, to allow the game to be played on any res from 1366 x 768 up. Alongside that, there needs to be a nice way to support the phone, and the different form factor there without essentially creating a second game. (That would defeat the point of having a cross platform engine and game)