Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Development

Lighting system

Finished the lighting system I started yesterday… The results are rather good and easy to use (and no more silly crashes). The light generation is fast enough that I can do it in runtime, when the level loads, which is easier to manage in terms of files (no need to keep an unlit file). Now, […]

More editor stuff

A plan is something that exists until the first contact with reality… Tonight I was intending to start the level design for the corporate HQ, but when I started lighting the place I saw the flaw in my plan… Most of the levels I’ve made so far have a very small number of lights… And […]

Building visuals

Today I didn’t have much time to work on the game, but it was highly productive… I was trying out different approaches to the visuals on the corporate facility, playing with tilesets and lighting to achieve a proper mood… First, I tried just the classic red lighting: It looks good, but it’s a bit cliché […]

Finished cultist base

Finally finished the cultist base… Small details were making life hard for me, but it’s done… The final cutscene was very big, and I had some difficulty getting the text right… Also improved the machine gun fire, since it looked terrible in low light circumstances: Next step: another base facility… This time I want to […]

Invisible blocks

I was having some problems with silly pathfinding on the cultist base… The problem was that the fiery sconces were too low, so the enemies could climb them, which would look silly. For props, I use invisible blocks to stop that from happening, but since the sconces are just pieces of level geometry, that doesn’t […]

Dialogues, cutscenes, etc…

This is been very slow going lately… Writing decent dialogues is hard work, and even half-assed ones like mine take forever! I’m drawing to a close in the cultist part of the game, missing four plot moments, and I’m done with the storyline… So, hopefully I’ll be able to finish this part of the development […]

More cultists…

Not much work today, just added and balanced the cultists in their base: Getting ready for my vacations in a few days, preparing some blog entries in advance, because on some of the days I won’t even have laptop access, let alone code or blog about it… Now listening to “Whoracle” by “In Flames” Link […]

Cultist base

Today I’ve worked mainly on the cultist’s base… I wanted to make a different environment, but that still looked like a base, so I used the temple tileset and placed the “base” on top of a lava lake… I’ve also played around with the fake lighting on some torches, to give it more ambient: It’s […]

Playthrough, Part XIV

A bit more work on the storyline, including a new boss fight… This one takes the form of an arena fight with a lot of mobs spawning faster and faster. The fight is pretty cool, but it’s very hard… I hope my current balancing strategy (being very low-powered compared to what I expect the players […]