Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Yearly Archives: 2013

Shotgun is in… more or less…

Ok, got shooting to work… First weapon is the shotgun: It won’t be able to fire so fast (it’s a slow weapon, with a lot of damage), but this is just a test anyway… I’ve also fine tuned the movement and camera a bit, so the game feels a bit smoother; still don’t have a […]

And it moves!

Rincewind finished his first character (very nice result!), and it now can move through the landscape! I even added a silly shadow… Only 2 frames of animation, but it still looks much better than I expected at this point… Still need to work on collision detection with environmental stuff (trees, rocks, etc), smooth out the […]

Terrain tests

Playing around with the terrain system… Basically, I did a system with adds sine-waves of different amplitudes/wavelengths, depending on the roughtness… It generates some fun stuff, but it runs the risk of building impassible situations… Of course, this might be part of the gameplay (blowing stuff up to pass through, maybe?!), but I’d prefer not […]

First terrain render…

Here’s the first terrain rendering… This is a single area, and a planet can have multiple areas… This area is supposed to be 128x128x128 meters (although this can be easily increased)… Currently, the heightmap is just pure noise with an external boundary… Next step is adding a sine-addition based map (roughness is random as well). […]

ISR Log #1: Ideas

There were a lot of ideas (good and bad)… We played around with concepts like “being hunted”, but decided on “being the hunter”… The final concept was between the winner below, and a game where the player fought Dr. Who-esque “angels” using a flashlight to immobilize them and a shotgun to kill them… The idea […]

Indie Speed Run

Well, we’re will start our participation on the Indie Speed Run in a few minutes… You can follow the development here or on twitter (@shadowcovenant). Since I like pictures, here’s a picture of what we did last year, before we tapped out! Let’s see what we get as a topic: *drum roll* HUNTING / SILVERWARE… […]

Summoning system

I’ve finally put in the game the summoning system as a whole… It still needs some work (specially the effect, but I’ll leave that to the polish phase), but the system itself is 100% functional now! Had to add a dissolve shader so I could fade in/out “solid” objects (instead of using alpha values)… It […]

More Lua

Well, if you’ve been following this blog, you already know that I use Lua to script everything in the game… it’s a great language, but sometimes it has its quirks… I spend the last couple of days trying to solve an issue that arose when I lifeshaped exactly 10 imps to life… the 10th one […]

Effect systems, revisited

This last week I’ve been spending my free time working on the effect system, again… I remembered that I have the need to parameterize effects (for example, cast effects must take parameters like the target position or the cast time), and for that I had to refactor the whole thing yet again… Good news: I […]

New UI system

In the last weeks, I’ve been working on and off in my new UI system… It’s about the 100th time I try to make an UI system for a game, since I always end up with a system that I don’t like… First of all, I hate UI work, it’s simply not fun… Second, I’m […]