Voxel Platformer

This past week I challenged myself to make a simple 3D voxel platformer from scratch in C++. I reused a small amount of code from my previous voxel experiments (the meshing algorithm and the Qubicle file parser). I made all of the assets myself (programmer art (;). The external dependencies I used were GLEW, for loading OpenGL extensions, GLFW for cross-platform windows and input and GLM for math.

You can see the source code or download a release in the game’s github repository.

Physics

This was the first time I implemented a ‘physics engine’: I don’t think its fair to call it a physics engine since the only object which has physics calculations is the player character. The only two types of colliders supported are Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes (AABBs) and spheres.

Entity Component System

I followed an entity component system architecture inspired by the Unity game engine and wrote a format to store scenes in files. It ended up becoming a big mess since I made some bad design decisions right at the beginning and didn’t have time to fix it (in the next engine I make I’ll take this into account). I had the following component types:

• Transform - stores the transformation of an entity and it’s parent entity (used to create hierarchies).
• Collider - represents a collider in the physics engine.
• Camera - represents a camera used to render the scene.
• Light - represents a light (can either be a point light or a directional light).
• Renderable - represents a renderable voxel model.
• Behaviour - a flexible component with virtual methods that can overrided to implement game logic.

I had to write each scene manually using their configuration files since I didn’t have time to add an editor, which made the whole process tedious.

Graphics

I wrote a tiny deferred renderer with support for multiple lights (each bullet acts as a light source too) and reused the greedy meshing algorithm I previously implemented in my LOD voxel terrain system.

I didn’t make a GUI because I didn’t really have time to make one, so I ended up writing ‘messages’ using voxel art instead. This way I avoided having to write a font loader and a text renderer, which saved me a lot of time.

Walkthrough

You can see the game’s walkthrough here: