Spellcaster Studios

Make it happen…

Monthly Archives: April 2015

Full day

Today was a full day… I did a bit of bug fixing, related to turrets and traps and collision detection: Also added some polish in the end of the laser beam, and worked on testing recording gameplay video, so I can prepare to start doing some marketing stuff, contract press, and some SEO with the […]

Rollercoaster!

This is the best definition for today… It started great, adding new content the artist built: Also fixed a lot of small stuff, like making the player fall to the ground when he’s killed in flight, or selecting an upgrade automatically when purchasing things in the shop… But then I started hitting bugs… a lot […]

More polish and bug fixing…

As the title indicates, mostly that kind of work… The bugs were mostly small things, like the way one of the voxel faces UVs were not correctly mapped, moving the near plane of the camera when it was too close, etc… Also polished some things related to the camera controls… Now the character will turn […]

Culling problems

I spent a lot of time looking at a bug all wrong… I noticed that the voxels that had transparency were rendering wrong: Check out the front window of the ship… Anyway, my first thought was that I was adding to the vertex buffers the faces between two adjacent objects with the same material, but […]

Asteroid

Today I did mostly polish on the game. First I worked on giving some visual feedback to the player about where he can or not fly the ship: Then I added code to build “asteroid planets”, much more irregular… It was a bit hard reaching the balance of “don’t want to code this whole thing […]

Playfield

I spent most of my time today creating a page on Playfield, a site that generates pages for indie games. It’s still in beta, but it already looks very cool, and for us that dislike any kind of web programming and rather spend time working on the game than on the marketing (although I recognize […]

Spherical planets

I’ve been a bit demotivated in the last few days… No reason in particular, think I’m just tired from the DayJob™, but because of that I haven’t been very productive… Today I only managed to make the planets spherical when we’re in orbit, which should have taken me 10 minutes, and it took me over […]

Finished name generation

The results weren’t as good as I hoped, but at least they’re fully procedural and there’s not many idiot names in the lists… I tried using a syllable-based system, but there are just too many of those, so the memory required for this algorithm would be just too much! Ended up using a list of […]

Random name generation

Still working on the random name generation, not 100% happy with the results… So far, the system with best quality is based on probability. I give the system a list of “good names”, and he builds a dictionary of probabilities, which describe the probability of character Z to come after character Y, after character X. […]

I hate Mondays…

But Tuesday’s are also terrible! DayJob™ takes a lot of my time on the beginning of the week, so I get dead tired and can’t produce much on Gateway as I’d wish… Today I spent most of my time doing research on how to generate procedural names for the planets. Currently I’m using a list […]