Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Category Archives: Development

Optimizing

Let me tell you a story… As I said yesterday, I felt a real drop in performance with the pirate lair, and I couldn’t figure out what was the issue. The normal course of action (if you don’t have a decent profiler or are too lazy to find a free one) is to shut down […]

Pirate Lairs

Today I revisited the pirate lairs, adding a lot of new stuff, like rock walls, props, loot at the end and fixing a lot of small bugs. In the screenshot above, I removed the roof to be able to look inside. I’m having a performance issue somewhere on the lairs… Not sure if it is […]

Playthrough, Part IV

Today I advanced a bit more in the storyline… It’s going well, almost no actual code written today, just writing text and scripting the cutscenes… Took another first person screenshot… They look cool, think the next game in this series will be first person! Now listening to “Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi” by […]

Balancing

Today I didn’t have much development time, so I just decided to play the game a bit and balance some stuff, mainly costs of equipment… The thing that’s been bugging me the most about the costs is that I feel the fuel cells (which allow me to travel to another planet) are too expensive… I […]

First person mode

Today I wasn’t feeling like working on storyline stuff (need to grind for some alloy to get to the next planet in the story)… As I was talking this afternoon with my colleagues, I playfully said that I had to try the game in first person mode one of these days… And “one of these […]

Bats!

Just added the second feature of the caves: the bats! These are small, low-health enemies meant to annoy the player and distract him from the real danger of the rockfalls! I don’t have the art for it yet, so I’m using the player sprites to do the gameplay logic! So, I’m done with the cave […]

Rockfall

Just added another game entity/enemy: the rockfall! In certain places (currently only on the cave temple), there’s falling rocks, which damage the player and knock him back (which may cause him to fall down and splat!). It was surprisingly easy to put in, which is pretty good (and unexpected, most new entities give me some […]

Custom areas

Got the custom areas working in game! Still have some work to do in transitioning from custom areas to the normal planet areas, and vice-versa, but the base code is done… I still have a lot of work to do on the temple: introduction cutscene, a new type of enemy, a special hazard and random […]

More options on the editor

Today I didn’t have much time for development… I just added a new UI element (that is useful for the editor and for the options screen the game will eventually have): a checkbox. Also added the possibility to change the voxel material without affecting the color or the emissive. I needed that to replace the […]