So today I finished the new and improved initial area, hopefully players will have a better sense of “direction” with this one and will provide a good and entertaining introduction to the game… Still have a ton of stuff to add based on the feedback received, most of it quite simple, albeit time consuming… Some […]
As the title indicates, today I spent my development time working on the new and improved starting area… Some of my ideas related to it were ok. It was a good idea to get the player started in a more exciting area before dumping him into the exposition, so he has a taste of what’s […]
So today I carried on with the work from yesterday (and that I’ll probably be doing the next few days!), which is to fix/polish stuff based on the feedback from the Game Dev Camp. So, quick list for today: Drones now have a larger hit radius Game no longer waits 5 seconds before opening a […]
Today was a bug-fixing day… Most of my time was spent trying to reproduce stuff I saw happening in the Game Dev Camp (some of them were tricky to reproduce, like navigation mesh stuff, others were quite trivial)… Fixed a couple of crashes on “New game”, some stuff related to memory not being freed correctly […]
Today I spent my dev time looking at all the suggestions, comments and feedback I received from Game Dev Camp yesterday… There’s a ton of stuff to work through, but most of it is quite simple, just tweaks and adjustments… There’s just one I have no clue on how to address: the area transitions… Some […]
Today I wasn’t really inspired to tackle audio, so I decided to do some something easier: writing! Actually, what I did was mostly reviewing text… I need to go through the text of the whole game, just to make sure everything makes sense, if the tone of the characters is coherent (mainly Steve and Skydancer), […]
No screenshot today, since I was working on the audio… Audio work on this game is a bit weird… On one hand, I’d like the sound to have a “retro” feel, but that sounds terrible after a bit, mostly tiring… On the other hand, I’m not very good at audio design, which conflicts with the […]
Just added a shader quality system to the game, so that some shaders can be customized for less-powerfull GPUs (like the one I have on my Mac). Currently, only the ambient occlusion stuff is affected by it (since the Mac seems to be sampling-limited). So, without AO: Maximum shader quality: Minimum shader quality: Not amazing, […]
Still working on the occlusion shader, trying to decide what looks better… So, we have two options: using alphas (left) or using a stipple pattern (right): I prefer the right side, but based on some informal research on Twitter and on my Facebook friends, everyone seems to prefer the left side… So, left side it […]
Still working on the occlusion on the water… The major problem is that this is very render-pipeline dependent. I have to render the water in the depth/normal pass, or else I won’t have decals, so I’m kind of stuck with what I can do with it… So, I decided to try a different approach: use […]