I think the dark room with the lighting looks awesome, and a top down shooter looks like an easy first project right ? Although it was an accident in this video, lighting as a game element is not something that people use very often, it's normally there just to look pretty.
Oh, if anyone is curious it's in Java using LWJGL, because Java is the only suitable language I know a the moment
Fun !
Try it Out
Download the game launcher from here http://jacekk.co.uk/Lux/LuxLauncher.jar and run it with your favourite JVM.
The launcher will handle the downloading of the necessary library files for you and will also check for updates and download those for you if there are any, good eh.
Development Screenshots
30th May 2012
3rd June 2012
7th June 2012
The screenshot looks the same so I won't bother but I have made the launcher for the game to make it easy to play and update
The movement of the player has been tweaked a little and collision detection with the walls added.9th June 2012
You can now shoot
15th June 2012
Playing around with some lighting and GLSL shaders (which are not simple
)
19th June 2012
Threw out my old lighting code and did something entirely custom in GLSL, you have to do this to have more than 8 lights on screen WTH !
20th June 2012
This is what lights are actually meant to look like I think. It looks a bit flat because there are no shadows yet. Most importantly it's not fixed in world space rather than being a random glow in the corner of the screen. I also made the mouse wheel control the level zoom.
2 November 2012
After a very long break from the project I found some time to work on it a bit. Mostly I have been working on collision detection and the movement of the player which is not really nice
I've also added textures to all of the faces so it can hopefully start looking like the thing in my head soon.
But they are generally pretty easy to animate indeed.