Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Development

Most bugs gone…

Got most of the bugs sorted… the black spots were caused by a bad multiplication on the shaders when they didn’t have diffuse lighting, and the offset of the flow map was wrongly computed… Now everything’s working as it should: Still have a small issue with loading the flow map from the hard drive, but […]

More editor bugs, sigh…

Started the day testing the flow map: Need to make it more sophisticated to handle all cases (not just the test ones), but it’s a step in the right direction… Then, to start work on that, I loaded up a temple: A lot of problems here: the black spots (where there’s only emissive color on […]

Water and lava flow on editor

Still working on getting the lava and water flow to be automatically generated on the editor… Had huge problems getting the UV mappings to work properly: In case you’re thinking “what am I looking at?”, you’re looking at something finally working… All water should be black and the edges should go to yellow… Now I […]

More editor work

Found some more bugs on the editor… First I fixed the alphas (easy enough): After, I had to fix the “glue” system… After the revamp of the raycasting system, apparently I screwed up the one on the editor, so I had to go in and fix it… Was a bit of work, but I got […]

Editor effects

Today I started adding the rendering effects to the editor, since I’ll need them to build some stuff for the teaser trailer I’m working on… First I had to get it working again properly (a lot of changes since I last used it), but that didn’t take long… Then, time to add the ambient occlusion […]

Cracked lighting

As I mentioned yesterday, I got a small problem with the lighting of the cracks… What on paper seemed like a good idea, a decal that would illuminate the surrounding area, in practice it looks terrible when an enemy passes through it: The solution I found to this problem was to do some vertical attenuation… […]

Split mechanic and good ideas on paper…

Today I implemented the split mechanic… I wanted something to beef up some boss fights, and I decided to implement a split mechanic: when some robots explode, they spawn two (or more) versions of himself, at half strength… Visually, it’s not done (it’s too sudden, needs some transition, like an explosion or teleport effect), but […]

Finished shooting…

That’s right, you heard it here first! I’ve finished the new shooting AI system, and the rebalancing of all weapons… There still might be some work there, with feedback from beta testers, but the basic work is done there! Now listening to “The Theory of Everything” by “Ayreon”

Weapon balancing

Today I didn’t have much time, so I spend just an hour or so balancing weapons (mainly firing rates, etc). Some of the difficulty is understanding why isn’t a weapon firing, when the enemy has two weapons… For example, the enemy I’m testing now has a machine gun and thermal grenades, so he takes the […]

Boom! Grenade work!

As the title indicates, today I was working on the grenades… First, I added a shockwave to the flash grenade (or else the explosion looked a bit silly), then I fixed a problem with the grenade path (wasn’t taking in account the difference in height between who threw it and the target position, so it […]