Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Yearly Archives: 2015

Landing cutscene

The transition between being on the ship and being on the planet was a bit abrupt, it felt disconnected in some way, so I’ve added a small cutscene that shows the ship landing on the planet… This way the game feels more “continuous”… Now listening to “Nifelvind” by “Finntroll” Link of the Day: This is […]

Attack slots

The AI on Gateway searches for an attack slot on the target. That’s used to stop the AIs from clustering on a single position. They request an attack slot to the target, and they keep refreshing it, until they lose it if they don’t target it anymore. Until now, the attack slots were attributed in […]

Polished explosions

Somewhere in the last updates (OpenGL and even before), I spoiled the explosion effect: Fixing it was relatively easy, but then I noticed that the explosion was missing smoke particles: Unfortunately, adding smoke particles would require some depth sorting, or else the explosion would loose its brightness, which is not what I wanted… After mucking […]

New pulse cannon effect

Still working on the game polish, focusing on the weapon effects, mostly replacing the old “line drawing” effect for a better effect, using actual quad rendering and pre-multiplied alpha: Looks much better than the old version (of which I can’t find any screenshots ). Polish phase is fun but very time consuming! Now listening to […]

Minor polish

Today I mostly fixed small things that were on the polish list for ages now, like transparent map display (and better filtering on it), and other dozens of small items: Sometimes this takes way longer than it should, not from an actual work perspective, but just deciding if 60% opacity is better than 50% and […]

Loader

Well, this is one of those days that feels like a waste, although it isn’t… I decided to put in a loader for the game, so that the player has some feedback while it’s loading: All fine and dandy, working perfectly… Problem is that in the process of making the loader, I found a couple […]

Playtesting

Today I wasn’t feeling up to coding (a bit stuck on what the next step should be), so I played the game instead, fixing small bugs as they popped up, doing small balancing tweaks, etc… Now playing: Shadow of Mordor. This is an awesome game, they really managed to make a game that doesn’t step […]

Happy New Year!

Yay! And what better way to start New Year than to have finished the worse task on my task list, the OpenGL port! It still has some stuff that has to be reviewed, optimized, etc, but it’s functional and almost undistinguishable visually from the Direct3D version! Now, I just have to decide on what’s the […]